The power of less choice from our CTO, Aca Gacic

For our CTO, Aca Gacic, conversational commerce is the perfect vehicle for his impressive career in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. After spending several years in the healthcare space developing systems to automate complex human tasks, he’s passionate about applying these powerful, game-changing technologies to the world of commerce, where he believes less is more in today’s digital ecosystem.

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Behavioral research associates excess choices with unhappiness, decision fatigue, and overall detriment to our psychological and emotional well-being.
_{- Aca Gacic, Wizard CTO}

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In the early days of e-commerce, online shoppers found themselves with a powerful tool at their fingertips: a search engine that gave them access to an assortment of products never before seen in stores. What early search engines lacked in context understanding and relevance ranking—and they still do—they compensated for with an abundance of options for customers.

While access to more products and options can lead to discovery and drive sales, having more choices isn’t always better. In fact, extensive behavioral research associates excess choices with unhappiness, decision fatigue, and overall detriment to our psychological and emotional well-being. According to a recent neuroscience research study, the number of choices humans can actually handle is around twelve. Sometimes a lot is simply too much.

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Conversational commerce and trusted choices

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Conversational commerce invites brands to tailor each customer’s experience by providing fewer, relevant choices. Text imposes hard limits on what you can present to the consumer without creating more friction. And with the high cost of a long discovery path, the choices need to hit the mark from nearly the first interaction.

It challenges brands to build enough trust with consumers to be able to provide the path to purchase entirely through text. But trust is never a given, it’s hard earned.

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The magic of Wizard

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At Wizard, we build trust by providing brand and product expertise, and personalizing the customer experience. 

It’s important for consumers to feel as though they’re talking to an impartial arbiter of their needs with a vested interest in making sure they walk away happy with their purchase. Staying on top of consumer-specific concerns, and addressing them through highly curated product recommendations and hyper-personalized marketing goes a long way in establishing trust. 

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Conversational commerce invites brands to tailor each customer’s experience by providing fewer, relevant choices.
_{- Aca Gacic, Wizard CTO}

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But doing this at scale isn’t easy. Traditional knowledge base systems contain product attributes, categories, and variations, and depend on the text search technology to find the right match. Typing “something that makes bread rise” in traditional e-commerce website search boxes returns highly irrelevant results, while doing so in Google gives you a quick idea of what you’re looking for. Google’s entire business model is based on powerful knowledge graphs and searches that generate the most accurate results, using powerful language processing technology. 

E-commerce is headed in the same direction. With the use of powerful language models to capture semantics of consumer queries—and knowledge graphs that capture implicit relationships between products, brand expertise, and user preferences and behaviors—conversational commerce can drive highly-focused sales with an engaging, personalized consumer experience, and avoid the “flea market” of ranked search result choices. 

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