More than a month of lockdown and India is learning to shop for essentials with the defined social distancing norms. Retailers are also working overnight to adapt with limited resources and transforming their spaces to be social distancing friendly. The unsung warriors in the fight against Covid-19 are retailers that include your local grocers or vegetable stores to supermarkets and hypermarkets in the country working overnight to create a safe environment for their employees, customers and other partners while ensuring availability of essential supplies.

Dave.AI a Nasscom Deep tech club & Intel Maker Lab member is now helping retail brands quickly transform their stores into social distancing friendly retail spaces. For brands where stores are shutdown, Dave.AI helps them create virtual stores. Dave.AI is backed by angel investors – Mr. Bharat Kapoor, Mr. Sushil Kapoor , Mr. Neeraj Kaushik and IIIT-Hyderabad’s Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

Virtual Stores for Lifestyle Brands enabling Business Continuity

We are all familiar with e-commerce, but there are products like home interior and lifestyle apparel where all of us still love shopping offline. Considering most non-essential retail stores are closed, Dave.AI works with these brands to create AI powered virtual stores that enable a personalized discovery for customers that is very close to a physical store shopping experience. These stores are powered with a Virtual Sales avatar.

Dave.AI has recently launched a virtual store for ICA Pidilite, a Pidilite joint venture that manufactures wood coatings. This virtual experience learns customer preferences and makes personalized product recommendations. Speaking about this, an ICA Pidilite spokesperson quoted, ‘We have got a Visualizer made by Dave.AI. Being in an industry where visualisation really helps display the effects ICA Pidilite has, to the architects and interior designers and portray a premium image. While this lockdown due to corona virus has hit the physical interactions with our clients, the visualizer has really helped in connecting with the clients remotely and carry out business interaction’

Touch Free – Social Distancing Friendly – Retail Spaces.

The platform also helps customers create social distancing friendly retail spaces. For Supermarkets, Hypermarkets etc who are operating with limited resources currently, Dave.AI gives them access to a set of features that helps them transform their spaces with minimal investments.  

These include a bot that can help pre-book store visits to manage crowded entry, an app for security guards to authorize entry, upgrading touch screen kiosks into Speech enabled AI kiosks and QR smart labels to help customers access product information without touching the packaging.

Dave.AI is already working with leading Supermarkets in the country to help customer prebook store visits for essential purchases. This will help crowd management and also help tracking who has visited the store at what time, if this information is required by the Corona task force. The team is awaiting approvals from government authorities on using these tokens as vehicle passes, to ensure safe commute for customers. 

Features such as virtual stores with an AI sales avatar or speech enabled kiosks are helping our customers on business continuity & enable social distancing in their stores. This will continue to be the new normal.