Byte-Sized AI is a bi-weekly column that covers all things artificial intelligence —from startup funding, to newly inked partnerships, to just-launched, AI-powered capabilities from major retailers, software providers and supply chain players.
Home Depot brings generative AI to life for customers
Home Depot wants to bring the experience customers receive in stores to its digital buying platform. It announced a suite of generative AI tools, which it calls Magic Apron, on Thursday. The company said the tools have the capacity to answer how-to questions, provide further details about products and aid consumers with home improvement projects.
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When a consumer visits Home Depot’s site, Magic Apron works to enhance their experience by summarizing product reviews, sharing product guides and enabling users to ask specific questions. For instance, if a consumer wanted to purchase a build-it-yourself shed, but wasn’t sure if they had the correct materials for it, they might ask Magic Apron what they need.
According to the release, now marks the right time to release Magic Apron because the retailer’s “busy spring selling season” is slated to begin shortly. Consumers will be able to access the new features 24/7.
Jordan Broggi, executive vice president of customer experience and president of online, said technology will help the retailer unify physical and digital experiences to adequately meet customers’ needs.
“Home Depot customers have always relied on the expertise of our orange-aproned associates in the aisles of our stores to answer questions and help them solve problems,” Broggi said in a statement. “Magic Apron is designed to bring that same expertise to the digital world, leveraging our proprietary knowledge base to support our customers and give them the confidence to tackle their home improvement projects, anytime, anywhere.”
Home Depot said Magic Apron is “powered by best-in-class large language models,” though it did not disclose the third-party providers responsible for that technology. The models are both trained on Home Depot’s data and knowledge of home improvement projects and on publicly available information that can augment the company’s proprietary inputs. It plans to continue training the model on consumer and associate feedback over time.
In the future, Home Depot anticipates Magic Apron will act as “a personal home improvement concierge” and will, thus, be able to share design ideas, compare products, give product recommendations and more.
David’s Bridal reinvents business strategy with AI at the wheel
Wedding retailer David’s Bridal is overhauling its business strategy—and its leadership. Part of the company’s future roadmap is heavily reliant on AI; its new plan is entitled “Aisle to Algorithm,” a nod to the role technology is slated to play in the company’s future interactions with consumers.
According to a release from the company, it already uses AI for more than 90 percent of its virtual customer communications, from emails to texts and more. It plans to invest in a “ personalized AI-powered planning tool and marketplace” to simplify the inspiration process for brides throughout their journeys.
Specifically, the company will launch a platform that allows brides to discover vendors, plan the details of their special days and manage outstanding details. Vendors will also be able to use the tools to their advantage, with AI-powered matchmaking based on data. The company is expected to share more about the tools that make up that product suite in Q2.
Kelly Cook, David Bridal’s new CEO, said the strategy and technology will help make the leadup to a bride’s wedding day special.
“Serving her is all we think about, that’s why we call ourselves ‘Dream Makers.’ We are poised to become the only player in the wedding industry with an integrated retail, loyalty, media, and planning ecosystem—backed by proprietary first-party data no competitor can match. We are redefining what it means to plan, shop and celebrate life’s most special moments for consumers and innovating how brands can authentically connect with consumers during these defining moments,” Cook said in a statement.
David’s also plans to leverage the Pearl Media Network offering it launched in December 2024. That platform uses AI to help deliver targeted ads to those in the market for wedding items.
What’s up with Pinterest’s AI labeling experiment?
As generative AI continues to become more mainstream—and more powerful—a broad swath of fake images, some depicting people and others depicting clothing, recipes, vacation scenes or otherwise, have started to cloud social media platforms.
Pinterest , where so many go to gain inspiration for their next creative endeavor, vacation, party or recipe, is no exception to that. In response, the company has started to add labels to certain images to help users discern which photos have been generated, in whole or in part, by AI systems.
It appears the process is still under experimentation. Meta, too, has given users an option to add a tag to posts, indicating that they have been significantly altered by—or totally created by—AI.
“Pinterest may show a label on the close-up of an image Pin when we detect that it was generated or altered with AI,” the company’s informational site about its AI practices notes. “We’re working on ways to expand capabilities to better identify gen AI content in the future through additional technologies.”
But for Pinterest, it appears its early experimentation hasn’t been wholly effective in cleaning up what’s often known as “AI slop”—or artificially generated images that give users an unrealistic expectation when trying to recreate something, whether a hairstyle, an outfit or a recipe. Upon searching for “braided hairstyles,” many of the options popping up had been created by AI but weren’t labeled; the same result occurred when searching for “maximalist design.”
It’s likely that social media will continue to flood with these types of images, and some companies may be required by law to label AI-generated content in the future. A spokesperson for Pinterest told Futurism that it will continue working on the issue.
“Impressions on generative AI content make up a small percentage of the total impressions on Pinterest,” the spokesperson told Futurism in an email. “As people continue experimenting with generative AI content, we are working to provide users with more control and context over the content they see on Pinterest. Pinterest will continue intentionally leveraging AI, such as our inclusive AI features, to enhance the experience for our users and creators.”
