Through a partnership with SAP, Obsess integrated the e-commerce platform within its virtual stores to create an interface that engages young consumers.

A virtual store platform looking to provide retailers with an entry point into the metaverse has partnered with e-commerce provider SAP.

The goal of Obsess, a New York City-based startup, is to change online shopping in a way that reaches the younger generation and enables retailers to sell most of their core products through virtual environments.

Obsess worked with SAP to integrate an e-commerce platform within its virtual stores and create a discovery interface that engages young consumers.

Through the partnership, Obsess and SAP customers can create digitalized shopping venues that could be different from or similar to actual stores. Consumers enter a 3D world online and can engage more immersively with a retailer in the comfort of their home or outside of their home.

“We are bringing that gamification-like interface to the shopping experience,” Obsess CEO and founder Neha Singh said.

Not all Obsess customers have 3D models of all their products. Instead, the company has a proprietary and patented technology that can take e-commerce images from Google APIs and create an immersive experience. Once a consumer clicks on a product, they get the same information they would see on a typical product detail page.

“The purpose of these virtual experiences primarily is to aid discovery,” Singh said. “If you think about when you go to a retail store, you are looking around — you’re immersed in the brand, you’re browsing. All of those elements are what we are trying to bring into the e-commerce experience, because today that discovery is typically not happening on a retailer’s e-commerce website.”

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With governments across the world working to enable broad-scaled digital transformation, public sector organizations are increasingly gravitating towards the adoption of Conversational AI solutions to redefine the citizen experience. According to data released by Yellow.ai, a leading enterprise-grade Conversational AI platform, the company has served over 2.7M unique users for its government sector clients worldwide.

Recently mentioned in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Government Services, 2022, under the chatbot category, the company works with key government departments across countries. The Yellow.ai platform has recorded an exchange of over 79M messages focused on citizen delivery services, exchanged between its Dynamic AI agents and end-users during over 5M sessions.

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO & Co-founder, Yellow.ai said, “Public sector organizations need to address numerous queries daily, and doing so manually is a time-consuming task. At the same time, citizens have a growing expectation of being able to conveniently avail government services. That’s where Conversational AI can step in to improve efficiency and human productivity, streamlining the process of delivering citizen services digitally while keeping humans in the loop. We have seen a huge surge in traction from government agencies across countries and our deployments are helping address some very unique use cases by bringing power to citizens’ fingertips on channels that they actively use. With continued emphasis on digitization, we expect Conversational AI to soon become an integral pillar in delivering stellar services to citizens.”

While text-based messaging channels are the preferred medium for citizen delivery services, the company is also seeing voice-based Conversational AI solutions gain momentum. The major use-cases, as observed, are for automating customer support, filing documentation related to government entities, booking services, raising complaints, making payments, and locating branches and offices, where the most traction is being witnessed on channels such as WhatsApp.

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New Industry Innovation Enables Any Brand to Create Its Own Customized Metaverse Experience. Charlotte Tilbury Is First Partner to Launch “Branded Avatars” as Part of Its Immersive Holiday Shopping World.

Obsess, a leading experiential e-commerce platform enabling brands to create immersive virtual stores, today launched “Branded Avatars,” a first-of-its-kind industry technology that enables brands to customize the look-and-feel and character style of shopper avatars to create branded metaverse experiences on their e-commerce sites. The new capability then lets shoppers personalize all aspects of their branded avatar, including skin tone, facial features, body shape, clothing and makeup.

Charlotte Tilbury is the first brand to partner with Obsess to offer the innovative new functionality, introducing it as part of its Charlotte’s Beauty Realm holiday wonderland to further personalize the virtual store experience and deepen its connection with customers.

While consumers could create avatars in mobile apps and gaming environments previously, Obsess’s new technology represents the first-time shoppers will be able to customize their own avatars in a browser-based virtual store environment—with no download, signup, login or fee required. The function also allows shoppers to apply complete makeup looks to their avatars for the first time ever, giving brands the opportunity to curate unique beauty looks for their customers.

In addition, the new function enables friends to shop and attend events together in real time with their friends’ avatars. Shoppers can use their personalized avatars to walk through and experience the virtual environment together, discovering, learning about and purchasing products, all while interacting and conversing in real time.

“Innovative brands have been looking to incorporate more personalization, gamification and social interactivity into their virtual store experiences to make shopping in these environments more engaging, social and fun—essentially more like shopping in real life,” said Neha Singh, Founder and CEO of Obsess. “We’re thrilled to launch this industry-first innovation and to push avatar technology forward for all consumers outside of gaming environments. Our platform now enables brands to create their own custom metaverse on their site—where both the environment and avatar style match the brand’s look-and-feel—to give consumers an unforgettable shopping experience.”

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