Manhattan Associates Launches Gen AI-Powered Chatbot
Manhattan Associates is bringing generative AI into the customer service experience for retailers and brands seeking to bolster their supply chain operations.
The supply chain management platform and technology provider has unveiled Manhattan Active Maven, a Gen AI-powered solution aimed at improving customer service while also while simultaneously reducing operational costs.
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According to Ellie Crawford, director of product management for Manhattan Associates, Manhattan Active Maven includes two major components: a chatbot for its customers, as well as features built to improve the service standards for customer service agents, further enhancing the human-to-human experience.
The platform will be generally available to Manhattan Associates’ roughly 1,200 customers across retail, distribution and manufacturing in July.
Manhattan Active Maven’s chatbot has native access to orders, payments, store locations, and product availability, due to being built on top of the Manhattan Active Order Management system.
“From a retailer perspective, sure, they could get a Gen AI chatbot and integrate it with an OMS, but that’s at least a six-month project. That’s an integration to maintain,” Crawford told Sourcing Journal. “Just having a turnkey out-of-the-box chatbot is game changing for retailers when it comes to speed to market—to be able to deflect those simple questions from going to human agents.”
Crawford said the chatbot is built to answer questions such as: “What time is my estimated delivery date?” “Was I charged tax on this order?” and “Why do I see this bill on my credit card statement?”
“We’re at a turning point where customers are going to learn that some of these more modern chatbots can directly access a database and find a shopper’s latest order and estimated delivery date,” Crawford said.
Manhattan’s product release comes at a time where more companies are starting to recognize the overall benefits that an AI-based platform could bring to its supply chain.
According to a 2022 McKinsey & Co. survey of roughly 1,500 business participants, respondents reported that the highest cost savings from AI are in supply chain management. More than half (52 percent) of the respondents whose organizations use AI said costs decreased from adoption of the technology. Eleven percent even went so far to say that AI solutions cut expenses by more than 10 percent.
Manhattan Associates first began putting together plans to offer the chatbot two years ago, mere months ahead of the Gen AI craze, according to Crawford. But the growing popularity of large language models (LLMs) gave the company an opportunity to pivot to building a more modern chatbot early on in development.
The second component of Manhattan Active Maven, which is built to help bolster the customer service agent experience, was a “natural fit” to incorporate Gen AI, Crawford said. This is because customer service agents deal almost exclusively in conversational data, including chat transcripts, phone calls and emails—all data points that can be understood via LLMs.
“Traditionally, agents will catch up as they are literally reading through the transcript to see what you talk to the chatbot about,” said Crawford. “But with Maven, we can summarize that and so you know the customer is angry because he ordered the suit for his brother’s wedding and it’s late. It gets them up to speed and ready to go. That also can save them 30 seconds for every time the chatbot transfers.”
Alongside Manhattan Active Maven, the supply chain technology provider is launching Manhattan Assist, a Gen AI-powered assistant that provides contextual responses to any questions regarding product functionality, API structures and more.
“Imagine an inventory planner who works for a retailer—they would be the user of this product,” Crawford said. “We’re releasing a chatbot interface for them to interact with our thousands of pages of product documentation, API documentation, etc. Product documentation is great and it’s detailed, but finding the answer that you need can be a real challenge manually.”
Manhattan Assist will also provide a natural language summary of how Manhattan Active applications are currently configured. This new feature is included with all Manhattan Active solution subscriptions, providing assistance across multiple personas, roles, and functions.
Crawford said there are plenty of opportunities for Manhattan to expand Gen AI capabilities within its other offerings, such as clienteling features within Manhattan Active Point of Sale.
“Store associates in certain high-end retailers might be drafting emails to customers to say, ‘Hey, we got the latest spring shipment here. Here’s some items we think you might like,’” said Crawford. “There’s some opportunity in some of those areas where store associates are taking more of a selling role and having conversations in that digital text format.”
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