magia.ai, the first AI company to power proactive consumer selling with retail bots, announced today the launch of its Cognitive Selling Platform to deliver human-like selling interactions on any digital channel for retailers, including in-store displays. As a result, retailers will be able to provide human-like sales assistance to shoppers anywhere they shop – on websites, apps, social media, messaging services, retail displays and kiosks, and evolve their autonomous shopping strategies to compete with formats such as Amazon Go.

After trials with large independent retailers over the past 3 months, the company has commercially deployed with some of the country’s largest wine retailers. A video demonstration can be seen here: https://youtu.be/hMm2VoaD1P4.

“The vast number of selling ‘bots’ are largely dependent on pre-determined static workflows and smart replies that constrain the user’s interactions, and this simplistic approach has given bots the negative perception of being unusable for anything other than very narrow and predictable domains such as weather, news and fast food,” said Cheng Zou, CEO of magia.ai. “We have built capabilities not seen before in the market, and are applying those to the most challenging applications of retail where shoppers need to overcome overwhelming choices, complex feature considerations and personal concerns.”

magia.ai was started to break through the barrier of relatively unintelligent bots becoming the norm. With magia, for the first time users have the ability to interact in the free-form way they do with other people. Shopping behavior is essentially unpredictable, and shoppers traverse a journey before coming to a decision. Without giving shoppers the freedom to traverse this journey the way they feel comfortable and natural, getting to a purchase decision is a challenge.

magia.ai brings the human-touch to digital selling:

magia.ai Cognitive Selling Platform powers Virtual Sales Assistants that interact with shoppers using natural language text messaging or voice in human-like fashion. In addition to understanding free-form natural language inputs, the Virtual Sales Assistant can follow shifting shopper considerations as happens during natural shopping interactions, and continually adapt product selections for the shopper. It uses a combination of 27 selling techniques to create buying rationale with natural language dialog, explaining how products match shoppers’ needs.

Through combining deep domain knowledge, domain specific selling techniques, and natural language understanding trained for retailing and specifically optimized for each domain, magia creates the most advanced selling solution that can outperform even the most accomplished retail sales person. magia Virtual Sales Assistants have instant recall of millions of products, all their attributes, performance reviews, and more.

As a result, retailers get the ability to proactively sell on every channel, rather than only depend on search and recommendations which aid discovery, but passively rely on users to get motivated to purchase. Importantly, retailers get the ability to maintain consistent selling approaches across all their channels for true omni-channel customer experiences.

Fast and easy deployment options:

Since the domain specific Virtual Sales Assistants are already trained in domain knowledge and selling techniques, retailers can deploy magia Virtual Sales Assistants within days or weeks with minor customization for retailer specific catalogs and sales approach.

Unprecedented retail analytics and business intelligence:

Such digital selling captures user intent and objections in their own language, and thereby delivers precise shopper buying behavior analytics not possible before. Retailers can understand shopper needs and buying triggers, and create assortment and merchandizing strategies as never before.

Current deployments:

magia.ai’s first launched Virtual Sales Assistant is for wine retailing. The magia Virtual Sommelier is trained to sell millions of wines based on region, taste profile, varietals, food-pairing, price and other soft considerations, such as rarity, prestige, awards and other associations.

“We chose magia Virtual Sommelier as an invaluable tool for our online customers to make informed knowledgeable choices about our wine selection. It has proven to be all that and more,” said Ron Vaughn, CEO of Argonaut Liquors, the largest liquor store in metro Denver with over 8,000 wines and 40,000 sq. feet of retail space. “Increasingly wine shoppers are visiting our website not only for selection but also for wine information and the Virtual Sommelier provides all of that. It has become a great resource for my staff, adding to their education and ability to manage our inventory. It helps my customers and employees make great informed choices and they learn a lot along the way.”

“Westchester Wine operates in Westchester county where our shoppers are highly educated, tech-savvy professionals and very selective about their wine,” said Sunil Khurana, CEO of Westchester Wine. “magia Virtual Sommelier gives our customer the expert advice they need whether they are in our store or on our website. It will allow them to confidently know that every wine recommendation has taken their considerations into account to pick the most suitable wine – with a convenient, natural and intuitive solution.”

The magia Virtual Sommelier can help shoppers find suitable wines among thousands of wines that a retailer may carry. Shoppers can dialog as they would with a human, and the Virtual Sommelier can fluidly adapt the selections even as shoppers change considerations of taste, varietal, region, food-pairing, price and other attributes. A video demonstration can be seen here: https://youtu.be/hMm2VoaD1P4.

“We started with wine as a category for fine tuning our Cognitive Selling Platform capabilities because wine can actually be one of the more complex purchases,” added Cheng Zou. “Most people like wine, and yet they actually know very little about it. There are also hundreds, if not thousands of wines that a typical store carries. People rely on human assistance, and the reality is that most wine specialists know only a few wines and don’t always have the ability to match a user’s need with the most optimal selection. This is where magia not only helps find the optimal wine, but also explains to a user why it is so. This has not been done before with the finesse that we do.”

magia Virtual Sommelier is currently being rolled out nationwide. magia is demonstrating the Virtual Sommelier live at CES in Las Vegas, January 9-12, 2018, at Eureka Park, Booth: 52872, and at the Innovations Lab at NRF Big Show in New York, January 14-16. More information about magia.ai can be found at www.magia.ai or by contacting magia at info@magia.ai.

ABOUT MAGIA.AI

magia.ai is a Silicon Valley venture backed AI startup founded by serial tech entrepreneurs in 2016. Focused on AI for autonomous retailing, magia has created the Cognitive Selling Platform, the world’s first autonomous selling platform with a human-touch for retailers. With magia, retailers can provide expert sales assistance on any digital channel for shoppers to make complex buying decisions with confidence and ease. magia Cognitive Selling Platform powers magia Virtual Sales Assistants that interact with shoppers using natural language to provide expert product knowledge, intelligent shopping assistance and fluid customer interactions surpassing human capabilities and sales expertise. www.magia.ai / info@magia.ai.