Online card service Moonpig has reported a jump in sales due to the increased use of AI to help design cards, personalize customer messages and answer questions.
The company said sales rose 6.7% to £169m in the six months to October 31 and have remained strong in the weeks since, mainly as a result of increased orders and spend per order on its core Moonpig brand.
“AI is designing a lot of the cards for us now,” said Nikil Raithatha, its chief executive. He said technology has helped in creating everything from baby and birthday cards to corporate greetings related to a particular business.
“It’s still being managed by our in-house team. We make sure a person will see it and that it’s relevant and exciting to customers. We don’t want to flood our site with generic designs. We’re being careful.”
Strong sales helped lift the company, which also operates Gretz elsewhere in Europe and sells vouchers for experiences such as spa days and cinema trips, back in the black for the half year with a pre-tax profit of £26.6m, compared with a loss of £33.3m a year earlier.
Nearly half of purchases use AI-based features to help shoppers add a creative spin to their messages, whether it’s stickers, photos or personalized handwriting, up from just 2% two years ago.
Recent developments in technology allow the buyer to automatically customize a wide range of designs to meet certain needs, such as targeting a particular age or relative.
The company said its new AI chat system already resolves a third of all queries and added: “Customers consistently rate these interactions much higher than human-driven ones”.
Raithatha said the company “is not seeing this as a threat or a loss of jobs” but that it could increase productivity by suggesting 50 or more designs that a person can edit, customize or curate, rather than just designing one or two cards a day.
“We still need that creativity,” said the CEO, who is stepping down at the end of the month and will be replaced by Katherine Fairs, chief operating officer of used car marketplace Autotrader.
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Raithatha said the tax and spending changes announced in the Chancellor’s Budget last month had not led to any notable changes in customer behaviour, but recent trading had been “very encouraging” with a “great start to peak trading” over the festive period.
He said there was “hopefully less uncertainty” now that the measures had been announced, leaving “businesses more able to make decisions”.
