Digital: How Chatbots Are Transforming Beauty

Facebook counted 2 billion messages sent between consumers and businesses last year. This year, that number has already quadrupled. Andy Mauro, chief executive officer and cofounder of Automat, a company specializing in artificial intelligence-driven conversational marketing, spoke at the forum about the rise of chatbots. Mauro said the technology is especially popular in beauty, as “most beauty brands” have already launched at least one bot or voice system. “Our customers thought that, using conversational AI, they could achieve this marketing dream of talking to every customer,” he said. “That’s an impossibility. Technology is making that at least partly possible. What happens when you start talking to customers is you start learning about them in their own words.” Chatbots, he said, allow the customer to be more vocal about what they’re looking for. This in turn provides more insight to companies on their customers in a way that is personal and less creepy — an increasingly important distinction in a post-Cambridge Analytica world — than other modes of online marketing. Most current systems offer product recommendations, which Mauro called “guided selling on steroids.” According to a study Automat conducted with Wakefield, two-thirds of women felt overwhelmed by the amount of products in stores, and nearly the

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