Buying Your Next Couch with AI

DJ: You are listening to The Art of AI Podcast with your host, Jerry Cuomo.

Robo: Thank you, DJ. Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is Robo. Jerry asked that I fill in for a few minutes today while he takes delivery of his new couch. There was some sort of issue in the delivery, which has delayed him a bit. He ordered it online and apparently it wasn't exactly what he had expected. I must admit that ordering home furnishing online can be a hit or miss affair. I mean, as an AI, I love the recommendation engines and chatbots, but often that's not enough and you're faced with thousands of choices even after setting filters. Perhaps someday someone will get this right, maybe even train an AI just for ordering couches.

Jerry Cuomo: Hey, hey, thanks Robo. Thanks for kicking things off here. I had a delivery in-

Robo: Yeah, I was just telling your audience. Did everything work out?

Jerry Cuomo: Yeah, thanks for asking. You would think with all this technology we'd have this all worked out, but no. Anyway.

Robo: Hey Jerry, I do have to run now. I have to meet DJ. We're training some humans on how to train AI, so I'll see you later. Bye.

Jerry Cuomo: Thanks, Robo. Appreciate it. So we have a podcast to tend to, and as luck would have it, our guest today is appropriately an innovator in the furniture industry. His name is Alex Back and he's the founder and CEO of couch. com. Couch is the destination for everything couch related. And if you go to couch. com, you're greeted with a, " Where the blank do I go to buy a new couch?" With a big button that offers you help in deciding. And he and his team is using AI to transform the often overwhelming task of buying a new couch into an enjoyable and informed experience. And with that, I'd like to welcome my guest, Alex, to the podcast. Welcome, Alex.

Alex Back: Thank you, Jerry. Appreciate it. Nice to be here.

Jerry Cuomo: Great to have you. And we have so much to chat about at the intersection of home furnishing, technology, and of course, AI.

Alex Back: I would love to have a chat about that as well. I am a little bit disappointed already though, Jerry, because I thought I was going to be doing this with Robo.

Jerry Cuomo: Yeah, well Robo just left. She had something to do with DJ. Too bad. She's amazing.

Alex Back: She seems like a real lovely gal.

Jerry Cuomo: Yeah. So let's get started. First question is very simple. Tell us why you love doing what you do.

Alex Back: That is a great question because we should love what we do. I think at the core, deep in my soul, I'm a creative person and I also really like helping people. I get a lot out of that. I found myself in the retail world about 15 years ago in a space that had a ton of opportunity: the furniture space. So this is a space that has so much opportunity that I've been able to be very creative, both in a business sense and also in more of a literal sense, like making content and taking an angle on selling furniture and marketing furniture that is a little bit more entertaining and lighthearted. It's an area, we're not selling medical supplies, we're selling something where there can be some comedy and creativity. And then ultimately wanting to help people as well. There's a lot of people really confused about where to buy great furniture. So you could be called a service almost that we're doing for customers by pointing them in the right direction and selling them great product.

Jerry Cuomo: Yeah, Alex. So where the blank do I go to buy a new couch I think is one of the questions.

Alex Back: Oh, very good.

Jerry Cuomo: Do you want to answer that question? Where does one go?

Alex Back: I'll answer it for you. I'll answer it for anybody. That's really where this whole thing came from. Working in the furniture industry since I was in my early 20s, basically, my friends have always asked me, " Where do I go to buy a couch?" And it's not like it dawned upon me. It is been obvious for a long time, but nobody really knows. Where'd you get your last couch, if you don't mind my asking?

Jerry Cuomo: Oh, probably online, Wayfair. And I tell you, it was a scary experience because I really didn't know what I was getting.

Alex Back: Right.

Jerry Cuomo: And it had to be delivered to the third floor of an apartment with a crane kind of thing.

Alex Back: Really?

Jerry Cuomo: So yeah, so I wish I knew a little bit more about what I was buying before I bought it because once it arrived, whether I liked it or not, it didn't matter. That was my couch.

Alex Back: Okay. Well, it's interesting. A lot of people don't remember where they bought their last couch, which is proof positive of a lot of branding opportunity in the furniture space.

Jerry Cuomo: Yes. Yes.

Alex Back: And a lot of people have bought their previous couch if they bought it online on Wayfair. I mean, there's no secret, they dominate the online furniture market. And some people have had good experiences and some people haven't had the best experiences. And really it's a mixed bag. You had a crane delivery. Now, if you had a sense that... I'm imagining at some point that was a surprise to you.

Jerry Cuomo: Yes. Yeah. How are you going to put this here? It's like, oh, okay.

Alex Back: So just anecdotally on couch. com right now, we have a lot of content surrounding what to do if your delivery goes wrong. And this is not something that people generally will prepare for. They're grossly undereducated about the ins and outs of couch delivery and more specifically, the couch buying experience. Is Wayfair the best place to buy a couch? It's certainly one of the most convenient places to buy a couch. But you highlighted one of the things that it can never do, which is you couldn't see it in person.

Jerry Cuomo: That's right.

Alex Back: So what I'm trying to do now is really sort of democratize the online space when it comes to furniture marketing and advertising from a retailer perspective, because we're bringing brick and mortar retailers back into the online sphere.

Jerry Cuomo: Interesting.

Alex Back: 80% of the commerce is still... 80% still done, the brick and mortar level.

Jerry Cuomo: Yeah.

Alex Back: And it's likely that you may go and buy your next couch in person after the experience you had.

Jerry Cuomo: Sure. I want to see it. I actually want to sit on it.

Alex Back: So you come to couch. com, that's a main criteria point for you, and we start pointing you in the right direction. Yeah.

Jerry Cuomo: Wonderful, wonderful. Alex, tell us a little bit more. This is a technology podcast, so tell us what the intersection with couch. com and technology.

Alex Back: We are really trying to offer the users the absolute best shopping experience possible. And you see it now these days, especially very relevant news. I think Amazon just came out with their shopping assistant, an AI powered fellow named Rufus that is going to ask questions and ultimately make the shopping and filtering experience a little bit more personable. And this is mimicking an in- store or a customer service type experience.

Jerry Cuomo: Okay.

Alex Back: And I think that in the furniture space, this is something that people really, really need. As we already defined, nobody really knows where to buy a couch, and there's so many variables that people are not very in touch with. So I know from personal experience, it takes a lot of selling and discussion to get people to a place of comfort enough to convert. So using AI as a mechanism of gathering information from people, asking them questions in a conversational manner that they don't find to be arduous is really the key to our strategic approach to this. We want to minimize the variables that are in people's minds when buying a new couch because there are a ton and we want to filter them down very quickly and point them in the right direction so no one's wasting any time.

Jerry Cuomo: Alex, tell us more about that interview process. How long of a conversation does it take you before you can actually hone in on, okay, I have an idea as to where to direct this person?

Alex Back: So I think it really depends on the amount of variables that are what I would call deal breakers to a person. Some people have one. Yours may be I just need to see it in person. Another person may have 10 variables or 10 criteria points that just absolutely boxes that need to be checked before they feel comfortable buying a couch. So it really does depend, but ultimately it's going to be a lot faster than it is now where really the industry is focused on inspiring people with pretty lifestyle photos of very... Wayfair for instance, their approach is to offer everything to everybody and put it on the customer to filter down results themselves. But by using a little bit of a conversational AI approach, we can really narrow that amount of time to get that person focused on what they should be buying down to a very, very small amount of time comparatively.

Jerry Cuomo: Alex, can you share what AI technology you're using? You talked about a chatbot, you talked about language. So can you share a little bit on what you're actually using in couch. com?

Alex Back: Yeah, transparently, we're building a platform right now, so a fantastic tech partner that is working on figuring out which language model we should be using and which technology we should be leveraging. There are a number of variables involved in that. We're sort of working on the architecture right now. It's very robust. So I mean, we're trying to aggregate data from essentially the bulk of all online and brick and mortar furniture retailers in the country. So how we sort of mark, identify, and tag, for lack of a better term, these retailers and these products to sort of feed into the training of the AI is really the part where we are at, at the moment.

Jerry Cuomo: Wonderful. So I want to raise my hand and say at some point we should have a conversation. I have an opinion on what you might want to use, but that's another conversation. But for this conversation, it sounds like you're building your own custom trained model for furniture selection. That might be a first.

Alex Back: Sure. I think I've played around with a lot of AI shopping assistants recently. Somebody on my team just to see, when GPTs became open source, recently built a couch finder just to see how far the standard approach could get us. And there's something there.

Jerry Cuomo: Sure. Sure.

Alex Back: There's something that already exists that is passable. You can have a conversation with an AI bot that sort of gives you the basics and points gives you some very standard recommendations. But what we need to do is go further than that because ultimately it's not that helpful. And shopping assistants in certain cases are not that helpful yet.

Jerry Cuomo: This is our inclination that the off the shelf large models will take you so far and they're impressive. But if you want to take it over the top, you need to bring your own custom data set and you need to do some fine- tuning and make it your own. So it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing, Alex.

Alex Back: That is exactly what we're doing. And just one other point, we're building this on the Shopify platform, my tech partner, they are completely dialed into the Shopify verse and there are a lot of third party providers that are looking in this space to pilot something in this specific arena. So we're also looking at different partnerships and things of that nature to really blow this out of the water when we launch the platform in about two months.

Jerry Cuomo: Oh, wonderful. Alex, if you can take out your crystal ball and look into it, what world do you see out there? Share it with our audience if you don't mind.

Alex Back: Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of democratization of retailers and products. And I think we've seen now with, for instance, TikTok Shop. It's something that everybody's talking about in the retail space because it's like almost overnight, has turned into a major affiliate or influencer monetization platform. And what this does is, is really just empowering the individual to sell products. And it's not necessarily going to be the one with the biggest Google budget or the biggest footprint in the country that's going to win every time. So I think we're moving in a direction of everybody who's in an industry, in the space of furniture, for instance, having a good fair chance at selling their products by being smart and strategic about it. And I think that we're just trying to sort of key in and ride that same wave where it's not just going to be Ashley and Wayfair where everybody buys everything.

Jerry Cuomo: Wonderful.

Alex Back: We want to let people know about Big Al's furniture Depot down the block because if they're in business right now, after the last few years, they're doing something right.

Jerry Cuomo: They're doing something right. Oh, Alex, this has been wonderful. I can talk to you all day about these topics, but I think you've given us all a really good taste for what's going on in your world, how technology is playing a major role. So we're really excited. We're rooting for you. We can't wait to see what's going to come in a few months. So thank you so much for being on the podcast here.

Alex Back: Thank you so much, Jerry. I appreciate it. And please tell Robo that I said hi.

Jerry Cuomo: Okay, will do. Thanks. Well, this episode is a wrap and I've included some reference material on couch.com in this episode's description section. And be sure to visit couch. com. It's your go- to source for expert advice on all things couches. And once again, I'd like to thank Alex and I'd also like to thank you all for visiting in. Until our next episode, this is Jerry Cuomo, IBM fellow and VP of Technology. See you soon.