Technology

How Starbucks is transforming customer engagement with AI-powered personalization

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September 20, 2022

Can AI help your restaurant? Starbucks says yes. The brand created an AI recommendation engine called Deepbrew to offer guests a more personalized experience.

In a webinar called "Transforming customer engagement with AI powered personalization" Starbucks AI initiative DeepBrew that was led by Brian Ames and Skellam AI's and Qubriux, Inc.'s CEO Arun Veettil, taught viewers about how DeepBrew powers Starbucks' "AI for Humanity." DeepBrew started as a customer engagement initiative and it has grown to inspire multiple analytics and data-based initiatives across the brand. The webinar was sponsored by Skellam AI and hosted by Fastcasual.com. Mandy Detwiler, managing editor for Fastcasual.com parent company Networld Media Group, moderated the webinar.

"The world is changing thanks to AI and ML (machine learning)," Ames said. "Everyone has a deep desire to see how transformative data can be. We're at a super interesting time in our lives where data is plentiful and compute power is outstanding and now you can unlock some of this data with big brains, big ideas and even code that exists on the internet. It's freely available."

"You will find a lot of generic algorithms," Veettil said. "I find that's often the case, but most of the time they work good enough but they might not work best because there's always some secret sauce of your business which needs to be blended into it."

To learn more about how Starbucks used AI to offer guests a more personalized experience, watch the free webinar here.