Artificial Intelligence gives rise to Global Store Assistants
10/07/2024
A POS system goes down in a super-luxury boutique in Dubai. The store staff don’t know how to fix the issue, and customers are about to walk away unless they can pay immediately. Meanwhile, in a flagship store in New York, the till won’t allow the sale to be closed, and at the same time the stock management software has crashed — the requested item can no longer be found.
Situations like these happen every day, often during periods of high pressure — such as sales seasons or peak shopping times. To ensure business continuity for our clients 24/7, at Aton we’ve built a dedicated team of around one hundred retail consultants, covering multiple time zones. This strategic team combines in-depth knowledge of store operations and staff needs with strong technical and software management expertise.
To ensure our clients’ business processes run uninterrupted, we decided to develop an in-house AI Store Assistant — a digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence. It has been trained on a comprehensive set of resources, including user and technical manuals, operational workflows, documentation, and best practices, enabling it to handle a wide range of scenarios. The creation of this assistant was the result of over a year’s work by our R&D team. The outcome is a brand-new professional figure we’ve named the GSA – Global Store Assistant. This role merges deep human understanding of how a store operates with AI-driven logic and structured protocols. It’s a synthesis of the collective knowledge we’ve built over the years, combined with the empathy that only comes from real human interaction — far beyond the pre-packaged answers of old-generation chatbots.
“Technological evolution has enabled us to connect with our clients through innovative support methods tailored to the fast-paced fashion industry,” explains Giovanni Bonamigo, Business Development Manager at Aton. “Customer experience must be omnichannel — and so must support. It needs to be available from any device, wherever the user is, giving instant access to the store’s knowledge base and interaction history at any time, whether via voice, app, or digital assistant.”
Today, our Global Store Assistants have in-depth knowledge of our clients’ retail processes and provide services that span the entire store lifecycle — from planning and on-site support during openings to coordinating daily operations. They offer fast access to training-related information, helping to reduce stress, cut down onboarding time, and minimise staff turnover.
Reinforcing the human side of the service desk is the Service Manager, who works alongside the client with a consultative approach — actively sharing insights, analysing data, and proposing targeted actions to drive continuous improvement and change management initiatives.
“We work with artificial intelligence on multiple levels, and we’ve come to understand that only a close and continuous integration with human intelligence can deliver the right answers — in the right way and at the right time,” says our CEO, Giorgio De Nardi. “With our AI platform, we’ve also developed services that collect unstructured content from emails, WhatsApp messages, and voice notes. These are intelligently processed and automatically uploaded into the company’s management system — even converting PDFs into searchable text and photos that are easier to archive.”
Hiring new Global Store Assistants is a strategic priority for us. We’ve already welcomed 17 new team members in the first quarter alone — but that’s just the beginning. More professionals will soon be joining Aton, selected through the .atonAcademy contest — our Renaissance-inspired training programme, which has just completed its second edition. A total of 520 CVs were submitted by registered users, and 160 candidates completed the course and received certification. Twelve have been selected for an experience at Aton, and in the coming months we expect to hire at least six of them.
Our AI-related projects were presented on 12 July at the “Infinite Area” hangar in Montebelluna, during .onSummer — our summer event open to colleagues, clients, partners and journalists. The occasion also featured the presentation of our latest business growth figures.
