Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is helping home furnishings retailer Williams-Sonoma Inc. with interior design across its brand portfolio to help strengthen its customer experience.
Sameer Hassan, chief technology and digital officer at Williams-Sonoma, shared how the retailer is using agentic AI on a call previewing Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event. Hassan explained that using Agentforce — Salesforce’s proprietary agentic AI technology — Williams Sonoma has improved internal operations as well as its customer experience.
When Williams-Sonoma started using Agentforce, Hassan said, “there was a mindset around ‘this is an efficiency play.’ You take the repetitive tasks, you automate them and that frees up people to do what they do best. But what we’re actually finding is that it’s not this divide-and-conquer approach.”
Williams-Sonoma Inc. operates its namesake brand, Williams Sonoma, as well as West Elm and Pottery Barn. It ranks No. 23 in the Top 2000 Database, which ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more.
In North America, 76 of the Top 2000 online retailers use Salesforce as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. In 2024, those 76 online retailers combined for more than $182.46 billion in web sales.
How Williams-Sonoma is using agentic AI
Hassan shared a use case for how Williams-Sonoma is applying agentic AI, focusing on interior design.
The process of interior design is difficult, and mistakes are expensive, he said. Getting the wrong size of a product or using the wrong layout for a design can be a challenging and difficult process for consumers, he added.
Using agentic AI, Williams-Sonoma has developed and is in the process of developing interior design agents, Hassan said. The retailer’s agents understand consumers’ preferences surrounding style and products, as well as understanding their homes and spaces in a way that helps with design, he said. They also walk consumers through “entire process of not just choosing the right product but making sure it’s designed in the right way,” he added.
As examples, he said the AI agents help Williams-Sonoma consumers avoid interior design mistakes such as getting the wrong size sofa, not having enough clearance from the door and having a rug size that “doesn’t quite fit” a designated space.
Agentic AI is allowing Williams-Sonoma to deliver interior design services “at a scale and level of quality that’s just unprecedented,” Hassan said.
It also provides a better end-to-end consumer experience, he said.
For example, a consumer who purchases a sofa from West Elm might stop there. They might explore other retailers to complete their furnishing or redecoration needs. That consumer might consider a retailer to fit only a certain niche within the redecoration process, Hassan explained. But offering agentic AI-enhanced interior design services could lead consumers to complete their entire space through the retailer.
“We’re really driving share of wallet, we’re driving average order values — so it’s not just about even converting the customers in the same day that they have been,” Hassan said. “It’s that once you can guide them through that experience, and you can deliver it with a level of personalization that they’re just not used to, they end up purchasing a lot more than they would have otherwise.”
Using agentic AI to improve internal operations
Williams-Sonoma also has seen efficiency gains and has automated repetitive tasks through agentic AI, Hassan said. But it has also helped amplify creative and strategic work across the company’s operations, he added.
He noticed that agentic AI has benefited Williams-Sonoma teams in areas including:
- Product development
- Supply chain
- Merchandising
- Photography and visualization
- Technology
“It’s not just about freeing up their time,” Hassan said. “When you equip brilliant minds with this technology, we’re actually seeing better strategic and creative outcomes from folks.”
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