Drunk Elephant’s “DrunkGPT” AI offers tailored skin care advice and personalized shopping in China

27 Aug 2024 --- Shiseido’s Drunk Elephant deploys its new “DrunkGPT” chatbot to enhance customer interactions in China. The “24/7 AI-powered” skin care assistant responds to inquiries — from product recommendations to skin care tips.

The skin care brand leverages Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large language model, Qwen, toward this application, which was trained on “hundreds of billions of parameters.”

This initiative aims to deliver a richer brand experience by offering innovative digital engagement opportunities.

“We have seen growing demand from customers across sectors, especially in retail, exploring opportunities in the generative AI area,” comments Yosano Masahiro, head of Solution Architect for Japan at Alibaba Cloud.

“We are excited to offer our full stack of AI offerings, from infrastructure, various AI models, to tools and services for AI application development, supporting them to better capitalize on the booming AI trend.”

Digital skin care chatbot

China’s brick-and-mortar beauty retail space is starting to experience softer demand, which could push established brands to ramp up engagement activities, particularly in e-commerce.

The AI chatbot provides real-time responses in both text and voice formats.Chinese consumers can now access DrunkGPT as a mini-program within Drunk Elephant’s “Drunk Moment” page. Users can interact with the chatbot through text or voice input.

The chatbot provides real-time responses in both text and voice formats. Alibaba Cloud’s automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies power the voice interaction function.

To enhance the accuracy and relevancy of its responses, DrunkGPT was trained on the brand’s knowledge database. It was further optimized with Alibaba Cloud’s various AI services, including SFT (Supervised Fine-tuning), RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), vector recall and a multi-agent framework. 

This digital initiative will also be integrated with Drunk Elephant’s offline launch events in China, in line with brand awareness campaigns.

“We are pleased to tap into the transformative power of Alibaba Cloud’s AI to bring skincare retailing to another level. We believe that this collaboration with Alibaba Cloud will help us further grow our brand value and better engage with our tech-savvy young consumers,” says Andy Cai, brand director of Drunk Elephant China.

Since 2016, Alibaba Cloud has served as Shiseido’s cloud service provider in China, delivering solutions including cloud-native applications, edge computing and security services to support the retailer’s business growth. 

In a recent analysis of UK consumer behavior, Drunk Elephant was ranked third among top searched brands with 37,354 monthly searches. The brand’s moisturizer was the most searched by Britons, as “Drunk Elephant moisturizer” had 14,450 average searches and was the fifth most searched keyword in the country.

By Benjamin Ferrer