Written by David Manning, EVP/CMO, A-list Communications
In step with this week’s webinar on communications pros embracing artificial intelligence (AI), I thought I’d share a recent case study of how AI can be used in award-winning campaign work.
My team at A-list Communications works closely alongside our digital division, Coffee Labs (both owned by parent company Lagardere Group) – a division that uses innovative technology to create impactful customer experiences and influence sales for their clients. One such example is their work alongside 360i agency for Kroger: Chefbot.
The award-winning Chefbot is a first-of-its-kind AI tool that helps people make the most of the ingredients they already have by finding recipes that use those ingredients. For users, it’s as easy as snapping a photo of their ingredients, tweeting the photo to @KrogerChefbot on Twitter, and cooking one of the recipes Chefbot replies with.
For Kroger, this meant teaching visual artificial intelligence to recognize over 2,000 ingredients from millions of photos and match them with the staggering 20,000 recipes Kroger’s in-house chefs have written over the years. All of this takes place within a single, e-commerce-integrated social platform.
As more people use Chefbot, its intelligence grows, creating not only a better product, but new opportunities to reach new customers at massive scale. The launch also included influencer partnerships with famous foodies and novice cooks, showing how easy Chefbot is to use and inspiring social media users to use Chefbot to reduce their food waste inspired by Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste program.
I can say that the uniqueness of creating celebrity and influence partnerships for Chefbot was different than for a restaurant or product because the talent would be creating the recipes and cooking themselves vs. a chef and there was less of a challenge securing participants given the communal goodwill goal and messaging of curbing food insecurity and promoting zero food waste.
As a product, Chefbot:
Knows 2000+ ingredients and learning
Can pull from 20,000 recipe responses in seconds
Is available to 330 million twitter users
Can save the average american family $1500 and 250lbs of food per year.
Is Kroger’s most successful social campaign ever
As a campaign, Chefbot generated the most conversation in Kroger’s 137-year history. Chefbot is still going strong, getting smarter and more helpful with every ingredient it sees.
