AI in Specialty Retail

Czech electronics retailer PLANEO Elektro deployed a BigHub-built voice AI assistant on its customer line, using ElevenLabs Conversational AI, Azure OpenAI and LangGraph agents with write access to SAP. Of 4,378 calls routed to the voicebot, 52% were resolved without an agent; average call time was 2 minutes 58 seconds.

Decathlon replaced an inflexible central customer service system with Zowie's AI Agent and AI Inbox, combining chat, email and an integrated hotline in one platform. Deflection rose from 30% to 50%, customer service efficiency improved 16%, CSAT reached 4.6, the AI covered the work of 19 extra seasonal agents, and support-driven revenue grew 20%.

avatarin, an AI customer service company spun out of ANA Holdings, built the Kurashi-Marugoto AI Agent on OpenAI's GPT-Realtime with Yamada Holdings. In a two-week public campaign on Yamada Denki's online store, about 30,000 people used the 24/7 multilingual agent and 92% of survey responses were positive.

Signet Jewelers, a Dynamic Yield user since 2021, ran four A/B tests using Element, which targets anonymous visitors from zip-code spending patterns drawn from 175 billion Mastercard transactions. A luxury-travel homepage lifted site-wide conversion 2.43% and revenue per user 5.71%; a sustainability hero for predicted sustainable shoppers raised conversion 88.6%.

Pooldoktor (Linz, Austria) deployed Qualimero's AI product consultant Franz in Jan 2026 — A/B-tested over 6 months (90/10 split, 2,214 buyers), causally measured +18.75% incremental revenue per visitor vs. control, 33× ROI, 13s avg webchat response, 19% chat-to-checkout conversion. Trained exclusively on Pooldoktor's Shopware 6 catalog with hard guardrails excluding structural/electrical topics.

Turkish footwear retailer FLO, with 800+ stores in 25 countries, replaced spreadsheet-based planning with invent.ai's AI platform on AWS, which forecasts demand at SKU-store-day level from sales, web, promotion, weather and event data and optimises allocation, replenishment and markdowns. Lost sales fell 12%, availability rose from 71% to 94% and out-of-stocks fell from 15% to 3%.

IKEA deployed AI chatbot Billie handling 47-57% of customer service inquiries, saving €13M. Reskilled all 8,500 displaced call center workers into interior design consultants, creating a €1.3B new revenue stream with zero layoffs.

Hunkemöller replaced a video-first hiring process in its 180+ Dutch stores with Bowy, an AI recruiter built on Scotty AI that contacts applicants on WhatsApp and schedules their interviews. After the January 2026 launch, time-to-hire fell from 18 to 4 days and game-based assessment completion rose above 80%.