Capri Group Adopts AI Agents in Customer Care and Hires Rather Than Lays Off

Capri Group, the Neapolitan company that owns the Alcott and Gutteridge brands, now has two autonomous AI agents handling about 50 per cent of its customer enquiries on their own, while the rest is forwarded to operators for more advanced support. The experience was illustrated at the Agentforce Summit Milan, organised by Salesforce and hosted at Bocconi University, by Marianna Colella, Group Partner and Marketing and Digital Director of Gutteridge, and Fabrizio Minichino, E-commerce & Digital Innovation of the Capri Group. Colella said the introduction of artificial intelligence "frightened us at first", but "today we judge it positively because it has induced us not to reduce, but to strengthen the workforce, achieving interesting results". The group now plans to extend the model to other sectors, such as IT, administration and even style. The project started about a year earlier, during a phase of internal customer care reorganisation. For various reasons the staff of that service had been reduced to just two professionals, who could not cope with the entire load of online customer care contacts. The company decided to introduce AI agents to handle the most frequent requests, such as order tracking or return procedures. For this purpose it hired two young engineers with a master's degree from Deloitte's Digital Academy in San Giovanni a Teduccio, who created the platform and launched the new system. The team developed a first Proof of Concept for both brands of the group in a few months and reached go-live in about four months. The project also involved young talent, partly through a collaboration with the Federico II University of Naples. The agents were able to handle almost all first-level requests independently. Over time their functionality was expanded to changing shipping addresses, rescheduling returns and managing codes for in-store order collection. The AI agents have been natively integrated into Alcott's mobile app, with the aim of soon extending these functionalities to the Gutteridge app and exploring new applications in agentic commerce. The two engineers were stably employed and are now developing new functionalities, automating several processes and implementing AI in other company areas.