ASICS Digital has taken steps to expand its product discovery and guided shopping experience roadmaps to account for the rapid adoption of new technology advancements, including Chat GPT.
Speaking at the Mach Two conference in Amsterdam, the sportswear giant’s associate director of product management, Mindy Montgomery revealed the company is assessing whether it will expand its “transactional” shoe finder solution, which guides customers towards its products, to include the emerging technology.
ASICS features in RetailX’s 2023 Global Sports Sector report, click here to download.
Montgomery noted that today’s digital business needs to place a premium on being agile, and making decisions based on data and customer experience trends.
“Our shoe-finder solution is our digital guide to how we think customers would find products, but do we want to look at building our own curated ChatGPT-like experience where you can ask questions and put in information based on your needs (in a conversational style)” Montgomery said.
According to Montgomery, Asics Digital is set to make that decision by Q3 this year so it can start to “either ramp up its investment in (current) shoe finder or go down the generative AI route.”
The news comes as ASICS recently partnered with AI expert, Omar Karim, to create an AI training scheme.
The programme, which includes a range of images of people enjoying exercise for the feeling, not aesthetics, combined with bespoke lines of code and AI prompts, helping its AI system learn what exercise really looks like.
At the time ASICS EMEA executive vice president Gary Raucher said: “At ASICS, we’ve always believed in the benefit of exercise, not just on the body, but also on the mind.
In today’s society, we know the uplifting power of exercise is needed more than ever. When we discovered that popular AI image-generating tools were creating unrealistic depictions of people who exercised, demotivating people to the point of exclusion from exercise, we were compelled to take action.”
