Fressnapf develops AI assistant for product advice with GK
Fressnapf is significantly expanding its AI-based chatbot for staff, ‘Frag MIA’. Europe’s leading specialist retailer of pet supplies has entered into a development partnership with GK for this purpose. As a first step, the two companies are currently working on making Fressnapf’s product data content available for customer advice on the shop floor via its chatbot ‘Frag MIA’.
“We want to use the chatbot to support our colleagues on the shop floor so that they can answer our customers’ questions even better and more easily in relation to specific products,” Randy John, Fressnapf’s Vice President of Product Development for Digital Store Solutions, told The Retail Optimiser. The AI is to work exclusively with the product content available in Fressnapf’s Akeneo PIM system – and not use any external sources.
Fressnapf’s employee chatbot is already integrated into Fressnapfs Workforce-Management-App Frag MIA Fressnapf’s workforce app MIA and is available to all staff in Germany on the Zebra handhelds and tablets that the leading pet supplies retailer introduced across all its stores last year. So far, employees have been able to use ‘Ask MIA’ to access all of Fressnapf’s educational content – the so-called Competence Club – as well as content from the retailer’s website. Now, the rollout of ‘Ask MIA’ to other countries is imminent, reports Randy John.
Co-innovation with great potential
The aim of the joint development project with GK is to enable the AI to provide valid, product-related advice via the same employee chatbot, without having to supplement the product descriptions in the PIM system or manually pre-structure the master data. GK’s R&D team is working on embedding, prompting and workflow orchestration to adapt the large language model for this and, later, for further specific retail use cases. The model is provided within the PrivateGPT ecosystem of FSAS Technology GmbH, which is also part of GK’s parent company, Fujitsu.
If a customer asks, “How can I stop my cat from scratching the sofa?”, Fressnapf staff will in future be able to provide even better assistance using ‘Ask MIA’, drawing on listed and suitable products such as anti-scratch sprays, deterrent mats and even cat trees. If the question arises about suitable toys for puppies, the AI-based tool can deduce from the product data which products are not too hard for the young animal’s still-sensitive teeth, are the right size, and are also free from certain harmful substances.
Next-level chatbot for staff
In 95 per cent of cases, this is already working very well, reports Pascal Singer, Developer Data Science at GK. He is confident that even those cases where it is not yet working so well can be resolved without the need to manually create structured data that goes beyond the product descriptions in the retailer’s PIM system. In a further step, the partners then intend to incorporate the specific availability of products in the store from which the enquiry originates into the AI-based advice via an inventory agent, whilst also taking promotions into account.
GK’s development partnership with Fressnapf aims to complement its already extensive range of solutions for the use of AI in stores with a dedicated GK Store Assistant. Based on multi-agent technology, this is designed to support retail staff on the shop floor with customer advice as well as with all other work-related queries. Integration into the cash register’s user interface would also be beneficial, for instance to display relevant advice on promotional campaigns at the checkout.
