After ChatGPT, Bard, and Grok, now a Mastercard AI chatbot is also coming.
Chatbots are bots that respond to user requests written in natural language, and are based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Actually, in these cases, technically we talk about Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI or GenAI) because chatbots use AI to generate texts or other types of content, such as images or videos.
Mastercard’s AI chatbot
As revealed in a recent press release, Mastercard’s chatbot will be called Shopping Muse, and it is already possible to sign up for the waiting list on www.dynamicyield.com/shopping-muse.
Shopping Muse was indeed created by Dynamic Yield of Mastercard, and it will be a next-generation retail personal assistant.
Its goal is to redefine the customer’s tailored retail sales experience, revolutionizing the way consumers search for and discover various products within retailers’ digital catalogs.
In other words, Shopping Muse seeks to digitally recreate the human experience in any store, translating the consumer’s natural language into tailored suggestions and accessories.
It will be a sort of “virtual salesperson” in the form of a chatbot, with which you will interact simply by writing questions and getting written answers, like with other chatbots.
Shopping Muse will allow users to easily explore not only product catalogs, but also current trends, even using colloquial or slang terms in use at a given time.
The suggestions that will be provided will be customized, that is, in accordance with the specific profile of the user, their intentions, and their affinity with individual products.
Dynamic Yield
The company Dynamic Yield was acquired by Mastercard last year, to strengthen its suite of consumer engagement and loyalty services, and to help brands deliver more effective and reliable experiences across all channels.
In the past, Dynamic Yield has been a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for personalization engines for a total of 6 times, and it applies effective and responsible AI principles and standards.
The CEO of Dynamic Yield, Ori Bauer, stated:
“Customization offers people the shopping experiences they desire, and innovation based on artificial intelligence is the key to unlocking engaging and personalized online shopping. By harnessing the power of generative artificial intelligence in Shopping Muse, we are meeting consumer standards and making shopping smarter and smoother than ever before.”
The President of Data & Services at Mastercard, Raj Seshadri, added:
“Solutions like Shopping Muse represent the next natural step in the retail revolution and are essential to bring the consumer back to the center of the experience. At Mastercard, we are leveraging technology and machine learning to provide better results for both brands and consumers.”
The advantages of chatbots
Regarding online shopping experiences, chatbots can help customers with their searches, reducing the frustration often caused by the difficulty of conducting these searches. The customer can turn to the chatbot as they would in a physical store with a salesperson, and thus easily find what they are looking for even if they don’t know how to describe it perfectly.
In fact, AI chatbots can also use advanced image recognition tools, in order to provide suggestions based on visual similarities with other products, even in the absence of tags or precise and correct information.
Obviously, the more they are used by the same user, the more they learn their preferences, thus becoming increasingly skilled at interpreting their behavior and desires.
If virtual salespeople have never been very successful, especially because they have faced strong competition from real salespeople in physical stores, AI chatbots could instead spread widely in the world of online shopping, where many users are already accustomed to asking questions in chat.
