Crafting the Conversational Commerce Edge: IM Digital's AI Brand Agent Solution for Design Shop

July 14, 2025

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5 mins read

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Can you think of the last time your shopping journey was truly linear?

You used to be able to funnel customers in through ads to landing pages, products, with supporting content like specs or FAQs. Today, customers' expectations are evolving rapidly. Shoppers no longer merely browse; they demand instant, accurate, and deeply personalized answers from the brands they engage with, even when navigating vast, multi-brand marketplaces.

This shift renders traditional support—like static FAQs or overstretched customer service teams—insufficient. Marketplaces and brands need to maintain distinctiveness while delivering expert-level guidance across numerous experiences without sacrificing scalability or quality.

Do you think that’s an impossible ask? At IM Digital, we thrive on transforming complex challenges into innovative solutions. We're proud to introduce a groundbreaking AI brand agent solution, developed specifically for Design Shop.

This isn't just another chatbot; it's a strategic leap forward, harnessing the power of advanced AI to redefine brand-customer interaction. Our bespoke AI brand agent solution, leveraging sophisticated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, empowers individual brands within a marketplace to deliver expert, nuanced, and scalable customer interactions, solidifying their unique identity and enhancing the overall commerce experience.

The Design Shop Challenge: Elevating Marketplace Brand Intelligence

Design Shop is a marketplace that helps homeowners and designers effortlessly find the perfect materials for their projects, offering access to thousands of samples across all major home improvement categories—including tile, countertops, flooring, and wallpaper—with unmatched speed, convenience, and expert guidance. By providing photorealistic visualization tools and shoppable inspiration, Design Shop transforms the complex process of material selection into an intuitive, confident experience.

As a premier marketplace, Design Shop faced a multifaceted challenge: how to provide individual brands within its ecosystem with a distinct, expert voice for customer interactions.

Alan Kent, our VP of AI and Emerging Technologies, explains, "Design Shop is a marketplace with many brands–these brands wanted an agent for their brand only before they would provide more information. It needs to be easy to support many brands, easy to use by brands, low maintenance, good quality for diverse data, leverage rich product details (MANY attributes), with customizations for different brands."

He emphasizes, "It has to be deeper, provide more value than available from other sources. E.g. go deeper than Google or ChatGPT. It has to be an expert in its vertical." This wasn't about surface-level answers; it was about delivering expert-level, brand-specific knowledge directly to potential customers, demonstrating an intimate understanding of their needs.

Engineering Sophisticated Intelligence: IM Digital's Multi-Database RAG Approach

Our solution is rooted in a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application powered by Google's Gemini Pro 1.5 and later, 2.5. The true inventive power lies in our multi-database approach, seamlessly integrating various data sources to provide comprehensive, accurate responses.

We've mastered data integration, harmonizing structured product catalog data (already supplied to Design Shop) with unstructured brand-specific content like policies, FAQs, and brand stories. Brands can effortlessly upload their unique content via a user-friendly Google Drive folder.

"We provided a data capture tool: Google Drive folder per brand to upload content. Also collects data from the product catalog (already supplied to DesignShop)," Kent clarifies. "This fed into a database used by a RAG application based on Gemini Pro 1.5 and then 2.5 with detailed system instructions to cater for various requests."

But what differentiates our approach is the intelligence behind our data retrieval—the system's ability to dynamically select and combine relevant sources based on the customer's query.

"Based on the request, we can use the knowledge base, or the product catalog, or both," Kent elaborates. "E.g. the KB might have information on how to clean a range of products. We can query the catalog by fields (price, category, etc) as well as full text. So we can do targeted queries based on the type of information available, but combine it as well into a single response."

This focus on queries ensures that every interaction is not just conversational, but deeply informed and contextually rich.

Boldly Navigating AI's Complexities: Ensuring Accuracy and Robustness

Our approach combines AI-powered testing with meticulous manual review. "Testing is hard with many brands and product types. It still is a challenge, but we used AI to automate the testing. AI evaluating AI," Kent states. "But we also do a lot of manual testing to ensure the quality is there. A lot of time goes into testing as poor or inaccurate responses are unacceptable to DS and the brands. This is an ongoing area."

Beyond automated systems, we prioritize user-centric feedback loops, recognizing that brands themselves are the ultimate experts on their products. Our intuitive UI allows brands to review customer requests and provide invaluable input, fostering continuous improvement.

"We also make it easy for brands (experts in their own products) to review customer requests," Kent emphasizes. "They get valuable feedback; they give us valuable expert opinions on their products to help us improve the solution. We built in tools to collect feedback easily from brands and DS - button clicks in the UI - to reduce the effort to provide feedback." This commitment to refined performance, bolstered by approachable collaboration, ensures a system that evolves with the needs of both the marketplace and its brands.

Approachable Excellence: Empowering Brands Through Self-Service and Collaboration

Approachable design is a cornerstone of our solution's success, empowering brands with intuitive self-service capabilities. "We provided a UI on top to allow brands to self-service load their content, to reduce overheads for DS to onboard brands, and give brands insights into customer requests," Kent highlights. This streamlined UI significantly reduces the overhead associated with onboarding and managing numerous brands, making the process seamless.

Furthermore, our system facilitates dynamic data management, allowing brands to quickly update information in response to evolving customer needs. "We can get data loaded or updated quickly. If a request comes in from a customer, the brand can look at the response, realize their data is say out of date or incomplete, update it themselves, and redeploy the content themselves," Kent explains. "So they can self-service fix problems if they want to."

This ability for brands to self-serve content updates based on real-time feedback not only ensures the freshness and accuracy of information but also fosters ongoing collaboration. "We also allow brands to leave comments and mark problem conversations directly in the dashboard. Collecting feedback helps us improve," Kent concludes. This collaborative framework is a testament to our commitment to partnership and shared success.

The Future of Brand-Customer Connection: Tangible Benefits and Forward Momentum

The benefits of this customized AI agent are substantial, promising enhanced customer experience and operational efficiency for brands within Design Shop. This solution provides potential customers with immediate, deep, and tailored answers to complex questions, significantly shortening the buying cycle. "It provides deep, tailor responses. Potential customers can get immediate answers to complex questions. That shortens the buying cycle," Kent affirms.

The AI brand agent solution we developed for Design Shop is more than a technical marvel; it's a strategic tool that fundamentally elevates brand engagement, streamlines operations, and deepens customer connections within a marketplace environment. It embodies our mission to reshape the future of commerce by breaking down barriers between customers and brands.

Your Partner for Innovative (and Useful) AI Solutions

At IM Digital, we are your expert, collaborative partner, ready to guide you through the essential transformation that intelligent commerce demands. We’re not in the business of AI for the sake of AI. We even wrote an entire book on AI to help you:

Understand what AI is and isn’t, in plain terms.
Assess your company’s readiness to adopt and integrate AI solutions, and if it’s even necessary to solve real business problems you’re facing.
Practical solutions for AI across: commerce operations, merchandising, marketing, SEO, data, and many more applications

Ready to start your AI journey in a thoughtful way that’ll actually resonate with your customers? Contact us today to explore how our bespoke AI solutions can transform your customer engagements and operational landscape.

Constante Quirino is the Director of Marketing for IM Digital. Having worked with leading brands and retailers across CPG, wellness, fashion, furniture, and interior design, Constante brings a diverse background in branding, merchandising, and search engine optimization (SEO) to every project.