This AI bot knows all about women’s tights. Here’s why that’s vital.

Photo credit: Flickr user Geoffrey Fairchild

AI-powered chatbots became a craze in 2016, thanks to advances in natural language processing, access to open source algorithms, and platforms like Facebook Messenger opening up to them. But the hype cycle soon hit a trough as more than two-thirds of the bots on FB turned out to be duds when they ventured beyond demos into real life.

A conversational layer for brands to engage with consumers 24/7 with intelligent bots still holds great promise. But companies have become wary about doing it in a ham-handed way that drives away users instead of winning their loyalty. That’s where deeper tech and more focused bots come in.

“The ones which will make a difference are those which have the domain knowledge to address core problems in a certain vertical. To use the same bot to order a pizza and book a bus ticket – those days are gone,” says Sanjoy Roy, CEO and co-founder of AskSid that makes AI bots for fashion brands.

AskSid’s IQ has passed early exams in Europe. The year-old Bangalore-based startup’s first big client is Austrian women’s lingerie brand Wolford. Five months on, the AI bot is engaging Wolford’s customers in 12 countries. Two other fashion brands have signed on in Europe, but Roy did not want to disclose their names at this early stage.

The world of tights

Roy gave up a successful career in tech business development spanning the US, Europe, and Asia to plunge into entrepreneurship. He headed the digital business group for Indian IT giant Mindtree’s Asia-Pacific markets before founding AskSid.

But it was years earlier, when he was doing his MBA in the Netherlands, that he first encountered the problem AskSid aims to solve. His wife Dolly needed a pair of tights to keep her warm in the cold weather, and it wasn’t something a traditional Indian is used to buying. That she was pregnant complicated things.

They decided to go for a high-end brand that was recommended to them, but were flummoxed with a selection of 200 tights. Finally, the couple just went to an offline store of Wolford, where a knowledgeable sales associate figured out Dolly’s requirements in no time. This got Roy thinking: How closely could this be replicated online?

The thought resurfaced in 2016 when AI-powered chatbots began to make waves. Roy reached out to the top boss of Wolford via his European business network, and got an appointment with the brand’s ecommerce lead.

He found out that Wolford had tried using human assistants to help its online shoppers, but the experience was inconsistent. It was hard to standardize staff responses and scale it up in 20 countries. The brand was happy to try an automated model. Roy then started to build AskSid with seed funding from Mindtree founders.

AskSid, TrainSid, and MeasureSid

AskSid’s chatbot is the tip of the iceberg; the bulk of the work goes on below the surface in two other modules.

One of them – TrainSid – ingests the brand’s product data from catalogs and other sources, including customer calls to the help desk. This helps form Q&A pairs, build product attributes, and apply AI to power engagement via the chatbot, which is text-based currently but could be a voice assistant in the future.

Then there’s MeasureSid, which derives insights from the chats for brands that they can use to update their catalogs, spot trends in what shoppers want, and so on. For example, Wolford launched a marketing campaign around opaque tights after noticing women asking for them in one of its markets.

AskSid is thus integrated into the brand’s product, inventory, pricing, ecommerce, and promotions data. It engages with customers on multiple channels, including the brand’s website, app, Facebook page, and Skype – with WhatsApp waiting in the wings.

From national digital ID to fashion bot

The next frontier