The online card service Moonpig has reported a bump in sales thanks in part to its increased use of AI to help design cards, personalise customers\u2019 messages and answer queries.<\/p>\n
The company said sales rose 6.7% to \u00a3169m in the six months to 31 October and had remained strong in the weeks since then, largely as a result of increased orders and spend per order at its main Moonpig brand.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is now designing a lot of cards for us,\u201d said its chief executive, Nickyl Raithatha. He said technology had helped create everything from baby and birthday cards to corporate greetings linked to a particular business.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is still being managed by our in-house team. We make sure a person will look at it and it is relevant and exciting for customers. We don\u2019t want to fill our site with generic design. We are treading carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n
The strong sales helped lift the company, which also operates Greetz elsewhere in Europe and sells vouchers for experiences such as spa days and cinema trips, back into the black with a pre-tax profit of \u00a326.6m for the half year compared with a \u00a333.3m loss a year before.<\/p>\n
About half of purchases involve shoppers using AI-led features to help add a creative spin to their messages, whether that is a sticker, photo or personalised handwriting, up from only about 2% two years ago.<\/p>\n
Recent developments in the technology allow a shopper to automatically adapt a broad range of designs to fit certain requirements, such as targeting a particular age or relative.<\/p>\n
The company said its new AI chat system already resolves about a third of all queries and said: \u201cCustomers consistently rate these interactions far more highly than human-handled ones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raithatha said the company was \u201cnot looking at this as a threat or reduction in jobs\u201d but it could step up productivity by suggesting 50 or more designs that a person could edit, adapt or curate rather than designing just one or two cards in a day.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe still need that creativity,\u201d said the CEO, who is stepping down at the end of this month and will be replaced by Catherine Faiers, the chief operating officer of the secondhand car marketplace AutoTrader.<\/p>\n
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