Grocerybot · Grocerybot – AI-supported text dialog agent for communication with grocery stores in European languages

This project will develop a business plan for the commercialisation of Grocerybot – a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chat bot supporting grocery shopping on-line. In recent months, the market has witnessed an exponential growth in the popularity of chatbots. This has been triggered by the actions taken by technology giants like Microsoft and Facebook who made it possible to release bots in their messengers such as Facebook Messenger. The market is dynamic and includes a number of still non-occupied niche areas where chatbots can solve unmet needs of business and technological nature. One such niche is on-line grocery shopping. Grocery shopping online continues to lag behind other domains, mainly due to issues with convenience. Typically, customers shopping for groceries on-line are required to fill their carts by clicking the products and defining the quantities. This process (ubiquitous in e-commerce) is very cumbersome in on-line grocery shopping. This is because of large number of items typically purchased and the need to define and review the quantities and weights of the products.A chatbot powered by AI technologies featuring machine learning, natural language processing and knowledge engineering could solve those problems by offering adequate customer assistance. However, no such technology has been proposed on the market to date. Loglab has been created to address this niche. We have a strong proof-of-concept of a grocerybot capable of guiding the user throughout the entire shopping journey online - a human-like assistant while shopping in an online grocery. The innovativeness of this concept has already been acknowledged by The National Centre for Research and Development in Poland which granted Loglab EUR 360K to develop the first commercial version of the bot for the Polish market. As a part of the Phase 1 project, we will develop a roadmap for scaling this innovation across the EU, powering the growth of online grocery retail in Europe.