EXCLUSIVE: How Curated combines AI with the human touch - online
A specialized e-commerce site founded by former LinkedIn executives helps provide personalized assistance for high-consideration, complex purchases.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Peter Ombres, CEO and co-founder of Curated, an e-commerce marketplace that connects consumers with industry experts, about the intersection of human and artificial intelligence in the e-commerce space.
Before helping found Curated in 2017, Ombres served as an executive in tech companies including LinkedIn and YouTube.
How did you come up with the idea for Curated?
The idea came about when my co-founders and I left LinkedIn after its acquisition by Microsoft. At that time, the prevalent thinking in the industry was that Amazon had solved e-commerce. That may be true when it comes to daily household goods, books, or movies.
But more complex, expensive, or specialized purchases require more guidance, and online consumers were left to fend for themselves. We saw an opportunity to create, online, the type of guidance you would get when you walk into a store and consult with an expert, which many people do not want to do in person.
We created Curated to be a place you can go if, for example, you’re trying to get into snowboarding and looking for help from someone who can tell you based on their experience what board is best for beginners in the type of snow you’ll be boarding.
Curated built a team of experts excited to help shoppers learn from their mistakes and missteps, instead of having them make expensive purchases blind.
How is Curated different from other e-commerce retailers?
What sets Curated apart is our unique approach to online shopping. If you go to any other site, you'll come across the exact same browser experience: hundreds of thousands of products that a consumer can only narrow down using filters and facets.
Curated is the only place online where you can actually interact with a human who can help guide you through that experience. Our experts can narrow the number of options from hundreds of thousands down to a personalized, curated set of two to three options that are best for you and your specific needs.
This human touch, combined with our technology, creates a shopping experience that's unmatched in the e-commerce space, especially for high-consideration purchases.
[READ MORE: How retailers can get more personal with customers – using AI]
How does Curated use AI to better engage customers?
We're using an AI consumer co-pilot to connect with those customers who are a little bit earlier in their buying journey. This allows them to ask questions, start their educational process, and begin to understand the terminology about products in a very light, risk-free way.
Our AI is trained on over two million conversations that our consumers have had with our experts. This database of interactions helps make our AI extremely useful in the context of shopping.
However, we've found that for the vast majority of consumers, there's a point in their buying journey where they have questions that only a human can answer. That's when we seamlessly transition them to one of our experts.
Our experts have tasted the coffee made by the espresso machine you’re looking at, they’ve had the chance to troubleshoot and can tell you, based on your unique situation, what you need. AI can’t tell you what it’s like to ride a specific snowboard. Our experts can.
What do you see happening with AI in retail during the next 12 months?
In the next 12 months, I believe we will see AI making significant inroads in customer service and product information delivery. Many sites will start rolling out AI for handling straightforward customer service inquiries, like tracking orders or initiating returns.
We will also see AI being used to help customers better understand product details, allowing them to ask questions about specs or attributes directly on product pages.
However, I think AI will struggle to fully replace human interaction, especially for complex discussions that require authenticity to build trust. We are probably still two to three years away from AI being able to provide a full, start-to-finish conversation with a consumer for these types of purchases.
Looking a bit further out, we might see the development of personalized shopping AI agents that can research products based on an individual's preferences and history. But that's likely more in the 24 to 48-month time frame.
At Curated, we're focusing on finding the right balance between AI and human expertise. We believe that while AI will become increasingly powerful, there will always be a place for human connection in the shopping experience, especially for high-value, complex purchases.
