With origins in the English countryside, The Cotswold Company is known for upscale furniture that evokes its bucolic backstory. Now it¡¯s bracing for the era of artificial intelligence.
It¡¯s a step-change for a business that¡¯s tracked the shift from mail-order catalogs and showrooms to websites. In its simplest form, AI means searching for items via chatbots, but agentic AI could one day see Cotswold¡¯s customers represented by bots picking and buying products like a personal shopper.
¡°There is always first-mover advantage with these things,¡± said Chief Executive Officer Ralph Tucker, who joined in 2020 and is AI-readying a business that did 80% of its ?123 million ($163 million) in sales online in its latest fiscal year. ¡°If our customers are there, we need to be there and we need to be brilliant at it.¡±
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