A View into the World of AI and Ecommerce with Ali Najafian

Great to have you on the show, Ali. Thank you, Stephan, for having me here. It's a real pleasure to have me here. I listen to your podcast. It's great to be on it. It's great to have you on it. I've been trying to get you on this show for a while now. I'm really happy to have that finally come to pass. I'd love for our listeners to understand a bit more about the under the hood of Trendy Butler. How is this powered by an AI where all your competitors–the different subscription box companies–they seem to rely on human stylists, and you've got an AI? Most of them use a lot of AI to make their decision making. Except with us, we rely heavily on our AI. Obviously, there is still a stylist because as much as you could throw as many AIs as you want on to this, still there's an element of creativity that's needed for a person to be applying to this. You never could control, let's say the system picking an orange short with a purple shirt, you got to sometimes stop it. Most of it is actually done through our essentially wired AI system that picks these clothes for people now. The way it works under the hood, it's a little different from how others do it. I'm sure you heard of things like Stitch Fix, Trunk Club, and all these guys. The little difference is that, instead of having stylists being assisted by this AI to make these decisions, we do it the other way around. We have the AI make the decisions, and the stylists really look and see if they made these maybe improper decision making. The way it works, usually how people attack the problem or others attack the problem, is that each person they bring them up, and then look at the historical goals that they've… Because throughout the process when you signed up, you essentially are asked multiple questions. Those questions essentially help us guide our styling methods and questionnaires. The way we do it is we turn this process upside down. When we acquire a customer, we ask them a set of questions. Those questions could be from your sizing, your preference in patterns, the type of pants that you like. Then we go a little further, we look at your occupation, we look at your location, the location tells us a lot about you. That tells us the type of clothes that you want. If you send someone in Florida a heavy jacket, I'm sure they're not going to like it. The location makes a lot of sense. Occupation makes a lot of sense.