An English furniture maker faces AI era of bots buying sofas

With origins in the English countryside, The Cotswold Company is known for upscale furniture that evokes its bucolic backstory. It's a step-change for a business that's tracked the shift from mail-order catalogs and showrooms to websites. In its simplest form, AI means searching for items via chatbots, but agentic AI could one day see Cotswold's customers represented by bots picking and buying products like a personal shopper. "There is always first-mover advantage with these things," said Chief Executive Officer Ralph Tucker, who joined in 2020 and is AI-readying a business that did 80% of its £123 million ($163 million) in sales online in its latest fiscal year. "If our customers are there, we need to be there and we need to be brilliant at it." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.