How AI Is ‘Energizing’ This Wedding Vendor Business

Almost a year after ChatGPT ushered AI into the public consciousness, the general benefits of using AI to empower businesses’ productivity and performance are well-established at this stage.

The capabilities of most business-centric AIs to summarise key content and action items, suggest informed and professional email and message responses and offer holistic help across the end user’s communications and collaboration platform(s) are applicable to every sector or industry imaginable.

However, there are also specific, innovative use cases for AI that each space and business will build on its own terms. For global wedding vendor The Knot Worldwide, who said “I do” to introducing Google’s Duet AI into its tech stack this year, generative AI presents several opportunities to streamline its internal workflows and produce an even better customer experience across its global wedding vendor marketplace.

Google’s Duet AI has empowered The Knot Worldwide’s Sales and Marketing teams to create memos and presentation decks more efficiently, enabling them to refocus on more important work. Additionally, eligible customer care team members leverage Duet to reduce the average response time for customer queries.

“I’m energised by the latest developments in AI and honestly blown away by the rapid rise of these capabilities,” Zohar Yardeni, Chief Product Officer (CPO) at The Knot Worldwide, told UC Today. “I’m bullish on the opportunity ahead for us.”

The Knot Worldwide is comprised of multiple individual brands which specialise in the celebratory wedding experience, including The Knot, The Bump, The Bash, Hitched, Bodas, and WeddingWire. As a wedding vendor marketplace, The Knot Worldwide connects happy couples with wedding professionals of different specialisms to empower happy couples to have their dream wedding.

“Tech is at the heart of all we do at The Knot Worldwide,” Yardeni said. “We support nearly 35 million users across more than 16 countries with an ecosystem of apps and sites powering every kind of celebration, from planning a wedding to booking a birthday party to preparing to become a parent.”

“Within our wedding business, we have a suite of wedding websites that can be personalised, planning tools, invitations and registry services. Through our wedding Vendor Marketplace, we connect almost four million couples per year with approximately 850,000 wedding professionals worldwide, such as venues, photographers, DJs, florists and more.”

Yardeni joined the company in 2018 and has since overseen the business’s data, design, engineering and product arms. He also recently developed an overall AI strategy for the company, which he segmented into three buckets.

“First, product features and how we serve our customers,” Yardeni explained. “The first project we started building, which is still in its testing phase, is a consumer-facing LLM-enabled product. I can’t share too many details yet, but we’re really excited about this.”

“This is the trickiest part of the AI strategy for us and probably many other companies. It’s not always clear how this technology will impact products. We saw an early wave of plugins and LLM-powered chatbots, but most user experiences haven’t changed dramatically or deeply integrated LLMs. When exploring the impact on our own product ecosystem, we’re not only paying attention to how the technology is evolving but also to how user behaviour and expectations are changing.”

The second bucket in Yardeni’s framework is considering how AI might influence The Knot Worldwide’s existing strategy and plans.

“In the new world of AI, unique content and transactional capabilities become more important,” Yardeni said. “Meanwhile, discovery innovation such as semantic search or step-by-step flows might be less important or become more of a commodity. Factoring this in, we are working to provide engaged couples with even more of the unique content they need to take their wedding planning from inspiration to action.”

The third bucket in Yardeni’s AI strategy is how The Knot Worldwide can leverage AI to enhance its internal efficiencies. Yardeni is especially enthusiastic about the benefits of using AI coding assistants: “If you’re a tech company and your team is not using AI coding assistants, stop everything and adopt them. The velocity gains are very real.”

“Outside of coding, we’re thinking about how to leverage AI for data analysis, summarising large volumes of customer feedback, improving customer service, and creating text and imagery,” he continued. “Most companies, us included, are probably furthest along in this arena because the patterns are common and new packaged tools are emerging every day.”

Given AI is transforming The Knot Worldwide’s technology capabilities, both internally and customer-facing, it is understandable that Yardeni listed one of the company’s “top priorities” for the next 12 months as developing its AI-enabled product to help couples find the perfect wedding vendors more quickly and easily.

However, Yardeni also said that The Knot Worldwide is “in the process of developing new improvements in search, registry, messaging between couples and vendors, and in the reviews couples leave for our vendors”.

“Our focus is always on optimising and elevating the experience for users, couples and partners — and I think 2024 will be an especially big year for us,” Yardeni concluded.

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