Introducing Astro: Smart AI-Powered Recommendations For Digital Commerce Growth

The perception of artificial intelligence (AI) and its possible applications has come a long way since the post-apocalyptic cinematic renditions of the 90’s. These applications have grown far and wide in industries ranging from healthcare and agriculture to robotics, navigation, and much more. The most impressive and expansive development in this discipline, however, has been the application of AI in digital commerce.

The scope of AI interventions in digital commerce, however, has been restricted to customer profiling and recommendations, and customer experience management on the whole. Extensive as these applications have proven to be, there is still a lot of untapped potential when it comes to exploring AI as a digital commerce intervention. The core premise of AI, a simulation of human intelligence and decision making through continuous learning and problem solving, has many more applications in creating great product experience – the core of great customer experience.

Enter Astro – the Amaze Intelligence-powered self-learning AI bot that helps manufacturers, distributors, and retailers build great product experience from the ground up!

Astro uses AI to accelerate item onboarding

With decades of experience, Blue Meteor had already gathered substantial knowledge and experience in digital commerce. It was now time to deploy these riches in the B2B2C space to put businesses on the path to digital excellence. Hence, Amaze PXM – a first-of-its-kind product experience management platform. While the platform was already designed to help businesses excel, the intention was to enable growth, and also accelerate this growth.

The result of this intention was Astro – not just an AI bot, but a culmination and personification of all this knowledge and experience in the form of an intelligence-powered native cloud software. The bot enables businesses to harness the power a huge data repository built on taxonomy and schema development done for over 90 million products across industry verticals. That said, Astro likes to keep things ethical. The data used by Astro’s Amaze Intelligence is purely public, and contains no IP- or customer-specific information.

A smart recommendation engine for accurate information authoring

When it comes to Astro, data is not longer isolated packets of information. With rigorous training and intervention, Astro now processes all past data as contextual information. This foundation of knowledge helps Astro provide contextually relevant suggestions for businesses looking to set up new product categories. It enables businesses to set up categories, governance rules, and normalization practices, and author product information in a fast and accurate fashion.

As Astro makes contextually relevant recommendations, it constantly learns and improves through machine learning. While it already comes with a strong foundation of data-backed product knowledge, it also offers great flexibility, allowing users to identify gaps and make necessary refinements. Once these refinements are made, Astro remembers them and applies them in the future, hence eliminating the need for any further manual intervention. By providing close-to-perfect recommendations for product information, Astro helps businesses reduce work smartly without cutting corners.

Business benefits of Astro: Smart, Speedy, Scalable

The advent of AI (in this case Astro) helps businesses be future-ready and future-proof. With Astro, you’re not just leveraging AI at the superficial level, you’re giving your business a truly digital DNA. The automation of repeatable, time-consuming tasks such as catalogue creation gives your team the time to focus on other growth-related opportunities. Even within the purview of catalogue creation, Astro helps improve product experience in a three-pronged manner:

1. As you introduce automation into catalogue building, you can focus further on improving product experience rather than expending your efforts on repetitive tasks
2. The automation of these activities creates a ripple effect that, in turn, accelerates time-to-market with a positive impact on product experience
3. Reduction of human intervention leads to an increase in the accuracy and consistency of information, once again, leading to great product experience