The online card service Moonpig has reported a bump in sales thanks in part to its increased use of AI to help design cards, personalise customers’ messages and answer queries.
The company said sales rose 6.7% to £169m in the six months to 31 October and had remained strong in the weeks since then, largely as as result of increased orders and spend per order at its main Moonpig brand.
“AI is now designing a lot of cards for us,” said its chief executive, Nickyl Raithatha. He said technology had helped create everything from baby and birthday cards to corporate greetings linked to a particular business.
“It is still being managed by our in-house team. We make sure a person will look at it and it is relevant and exciting for customers. We don’t want to fill our site with generic design. We are treading carefully.”
The strong sales helped lift the company, which also operates Greetz elsewhere in Europe and sells vouchers for experiences such as spa days and cinema trips, back into the black with a pre-tax profit of £26.6m for the half year compared with a £33.3m loss a year before.
About half of purchases involve shoppers using AI-led features to help add a creative spin to their messages, whether that is a sticker, photo or personalised handwriting, up from only about 2% two years ago.
Recent developments in the technology allow a shopper to automatically adapt a broad range of designs to fit certain requirements, such as targeting a particular age or relative.
The company said its new AI chat system already resolves about a third of all queries and said: “customers consistently rate these interactions far more highly than human-handled ones”.
Raithatha said the company was “not looking at this as a threat or reduction in jobs” but it could step up productivity by suggesting 50 or more designs that a person could edit, adapt or curate rather than designing just one or two cards in a day.
“We still need that creativity,” said the CEO, who is stepping down at the end of this month and will be replaced by Catherine Faiers, the chief operating officer of the secondhand car marketplace AutoTrader.
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Raithatha said that the tax and spending changes announced in the chancellor’s budget last month had not led to any noticeable change in customer behaviour but recent trading had been “very encouraging” with a “great start to peak trading” over the festive period.
He added that there was “hopefully less uncertainty” now the measures had been announced, which made “businesses more able to make decisions”.