You’ll hear a lot of superlatives used to describe AI platforms. Terms like “life-changing,” “cutting-edge,” “miraculous,” “inevitable” or “dystopian.”
When Bart Simpson, president of Flywheel Brands (PPAI 342144, Standard-Base) discusses MerchButler.AI, the new AI-powered concierge service the distributor is debuting for clients on April 21, he uses a term you might not be used to hearing in the dialogue around AI:
“Safe space.”
Users of the new platform can do a lot of things that they might not normally do, even with the Flywheel sales reps they’ve come to trust. They can ask stupid questions (sometimes the correct word evades you, and it takes a handful of tries). They can cancel their “conversation” at the last minute. In fact, they don’t even have to schedule it in the first place. It occurs at their convenience.
Hypothetical Prompt For MerchButler:
A good rule of thumb surrounding any buzzy technology is to look past threats of “being left behind” and gravitate towards proprietors with a firm understanding of the specific dynamics they are attempting to improve. In Simpson’s case, he sees branded merch clients being caught between two basic strategies when they are sourcing goods:
- They can go to the website of a large distributor and scroll endlessly through hundreds of options. What they need may be somewhere in the mix, but figuring out what that need is and finding it is its own legitmate challenge.
“The thought is that e-commerce made merch easier to access but harder to choose because there’s just so many options,” Simpson says. “The way we look at it, scrolling isn’t strategy.”
Bart Simpson
President, Flywheel Brands
- Or the client can go to a white glove distributor like Flywheel Brands and utilize the sales team as its own kind of search engine through personal conversations. The client and the rep discuss all the specifics and narrow down the need, eventually delivering a satisfying result.
One of the problems with that route is the “eventually” of it all.
“We’ve been solving complicated problems with people, but the rub is ‘Man, this takes so long,'” Simpson says. “There’s got to be a way to make this better and to make this easier on our customer.”
Enter MerchButler, designed as the best of both worlds. It operates as a digital conversation through a large language model, but it has the exhaustive product catalog of a large distributor. It is, essentially, an AI version of one of Flywheel’s sales reps.
MerchButler did not officially launch until April 21st, but PPAI Media was given an exclusive demo of the platform prior to its debut to get a sense of what the AI technology is capable of and to discuss with Flywheel Brands philosophical topics like what this technology might mean for the future and where sales reps fit into the equation.
Solving The Puzzle Of Better Product Selection
“What if the process didn’t start with browsing, but started with a conversation? That’s why we built MerchButler.”
As Simpson ran me through a demo of MerchButler (and later gave me personal access to it), the platform does operate as a literal conversation, meant to circumvent scrolling or browsing. It finds the product with all the specifics including size, logo, font, color and every imaginable detail. It provides mockups. It works within whatever budget provided and provides timetables or works around the client’s timeline.
The thinking is that a client and a large product website is an unsteady combination. There is no certainty there. It is not the client’s job to know exactly what type of promotional product or branded merchandise they want because they don’t work in that industry, so they are basically being exposed to a needle in a haystack. Simpson knows that a conversation whittles down the product to a specificity that yields a higher ROI for the client and brand.
MerchButler has that conversation on demand.
“We’re trying to keep the junk out of the ‘brandfill,’ right?” Simpson posed to me. “And the one way we do that is just offering them better product selection. That’s the challenge in the industry. We’re taking a step in that direction with MerchButler. Hopefully, a leap.”
The backend of the platform is also tracking itself for Flywheel’s purposes. The idea is for it to improve over every conversation and learn through its own AI. Which answers are leading to longer, better engagements and conversions? It is essentially teaching itself to be more helpful with every use. The platform can be more than it is now, but that requires interaction with clients, the way a sales rep can improve over time.
“There are so many more things we’re going to add to this as we go, but we want to get it out there, start hearing real world users trying it, breaking it, trying to see where its limitations are and then make it even better,” says Simpson.
What Does This Mean For The Future?
At a certain point in our conversation, I couldn’t resist stepping into a slightly philosophical territory with Simpson. Flywheel Brands, which previously did not have much of an e-commerce component, has always thrived for its hands-on, white glove approach. In other words, its clients literally value its human touch.
What an AI-agent like MerchButler offers in on-demand convenience and exhaustive knowledge, it cannot necessarily have quite the same feel as Flywheel’s best sales reps do for what best fits a particular client’s personality. So, I asked Simpson to reconcile those two dynamics.
He responded with an analogy: We’ll never stop needing to go the doctor. But the reality is that it’s costly and time-consuming in today’s world, and we often rely on the internet or technology to figure out if an ailment is something that actually requires a doctor’s visit or can be remedied with time or at home.
“It moves the distributor from the search engine and begins to make them more the strategist,” Simpson says. “So instead of just me and my team endlessly pumping ideas to an account, which we do and we do well, it allows the client to use the tool on their own. And if there’s a strategy decision that needs to be made before we press play, there’s still room for a human in the loop.”
Where things go from here is perhaps in the hands of technology’s potential.
Some would say (or would hope) doctors will never be replaced. But it is not a completely unheard-of belief that AI robotics will reach a point where medicine can barely require a human touch. For now, MerchButler produces something of a nonformal draft of an order, which a human at Flywheel will review and can potentially intervene with their own input.
But eventually Simpson is certain MerchButler will go from only a conversation to a cart, becoming its own e-commerce site. That won’t happen until it’s ready, but it is the next step, along with other developments, like voice capabilities in order to have more realistic conversations. How long will this take? Who knows, but for context, it only took Flywheel Brands about a month and a half to develop the technology for MerchButler.
For now, its capabilities are plenty to explore. As Simpson puts it, “the starting point isn’t browsing anymore.”
