Absolut leverages Dexter to act as a buffer for CX needs, disseminate content, and answer frequently asked questions.

→ Product Design
→ Product Management
→ Creative Direction

I worked with The Absolut Company to create a scalable AI system that would be able to handle common customer questions (e.g.: “why is my vodka frozen?”), while also serving as a content distribution channel according to their editorial calendar (e.g.: Friday cocktail of the week).

The process began with a two-day discovery session, where I led a group to determine core feature sets, technical requirements, and content necessities to fulfill Absolut’s goals. My team and I would take this information, and turn it into an initial roadmap consisting of five sprint cycles.

Each sprint consisted of two weeks of development and a week of user testing. We recruited users from Facebook, targeting Absolut customers within the channel we would be deploying to first. Overall we recruited hundreds of testers to help us learn and iterate on the product over the course of design and development.

These iterative cycles helped us successfully launch the product — named Lars after Absolut’s founding father — across three markets and two distribution channels in less than three months. In addition to the automated product, we connected a live takeover function for their Stockholm-based customer service team, allowing for swift triage when the moment necessitated it.

The initial corpus of data gathered over the first year gives our NLP model the ability to identify a wide range of intents and entities that will be useful for scaling across their spirit portfolio. Lars, having spoken to millions of customers to date, continues to improve and evolve, moving across new channels and markets each year. I continue to collaborate with Pernod Ricard and Absolut today via my consultancy, with a focus on R&D around nascent technology.