My Background
I previously exited from my last retail venture after scaling it from 15k to more than a million customers. Now, my sole focus is ShopMind. My ambition is to build this company with a 30-year view, spending my time and resources on maximizing my positive impact on society.
Our Mission
ShopMind's mission is to bring people the best shopping experiences through AI.
The Company
I believe that we have the moral duty of radically improving people’s lives in this unprecedented smart era in which we are living. Major disruption will come from allocating our resources to building products that leverage the current technological window that is now open for us. In the coming age we will see astonishing breakthrough advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Retail (both online and offline), and by contributing in the early stages, we can set the course for a positive AI future for humanity.
Hence the goal of ShopMind: to revolutionize people’s shopping experiences through advanced, consumer-first applied AI. This technology can eliminate the need to undertake undesired, time-consuming manual tasks when it comes to shopping. Starting with online retailing, the process of searching dozens of product options on different websites, with multiple tabs opened simultaneously, manually comparing prices, reviews, shipping fees and delivery time to get the best value will be automated through AI – allowing us to spend our time wisely in more purposeful and productive ways.
Our company journey will take decades — and require an obsessed risk-seeking top-tier team dedicated to our mission, billions of dollars invested and engineering innovation in order to achieve a mass-market impact. We face high risk and extremely low chances of success. However, if we are successful, we will not only completely disrupt the retail industry but also profoundly impact the lives of billions of consumers worldwide.
The Present
Three decades into e-commerce, online shopping remains a dull, time-consuming and draining task. We still shop the exact same way we used to in the mid-90s. Whether we’re buying groceries or sneakers, it entails sorting through endless pages of inventory with a dozen tabs and thousands of options to choose from. Consumers have resigned themselves to the idea that shopping means taking on the cognitive load of manually processing hundreds of data points. As a result, buying products online has become overwhelming and it seems like work. If we want a better shopping experience, we need to simplify it – and this means more applied AI.
The Possibility
Right now, we’re in the early stages of the single most significant technology disruption humanity will ever experience: the AI revolution. This presents an unparalleled opportunity to substantially improve our productivity and optimize the way we interact with the world.
As AI continues to integrate with human life at scale, we can predict that online retailing as we know it will radically transform. Agents that can think, learn, and engage with shopping environments will shape and gradually merge with the consumer’s shopping behavior, just like the internet did in the early 2000s. Today, retailing accounts for ~30% of global GDP (~$29.7 trillion/y), but as AI “incorporate” with shoppers, people’s buying experience will become by default instantaneous, surgical and insanely smart. Online retailing is poised to capture 41% of global retail sales by 2027 — up from just 18% in 2017 – averaging 10% global CAGR. This means that, without technological intervention, by the end of this decade, 1/8 of the global GDP ($12.3 trillion) will be reliant on an outdated shopping system. The potential impact is unprecedented: An economy with extremely informed, smart and connected shoppers will drastically change every major industry on the global economy that relies on some form of retailing, forcing competitors to optimize operations for increased overall customer value instead of profit maximizing (As it should have been in the first place).
On average, consumers spend about 30 minutes per week on online shopping. Without advancements in shopping methodologies, this translates to 58 days of a person's lifetime spent on unnecessary manual tasks.
We believe customer-centric applied shopping AI will transform retail across various channels and industries. From online retailing (~2.64 billion), to physical shopping (~6.3 billion), and to building new shopping interfaces. Our initial focus will be on modernizing online shopping for electronics, groceries and healthcare, where the need for change is latent and the market growth and datapoint volumes are huge. In early development, the tasks that the AI will achieve will be structured and repetitive, but over time, and with advancements in hardware, models and connectivity, these AI agents will expand in capability and be able to tackle more complex shopping tasks. Key opportunities:
Key opportunities:
- Online Shopping
- Physical Shopping
- Shopping interfaces
The Solution
There are two schools of thought on how to build real-world AI: build an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that has generic broad scope of knowledge across all fields of humanity and Artificial applied intelligence (AAI) that is highly target specialized high-functioning system that replicates and surpasses human intelligence for a dedicated purpose. At ShopMind, we believe that advanced applied AI build for helping common people to buy online is the desired route to have the largest overall impact. For that reason, our AI agents specializes in doing all the shopping heavy work, such as searching, comparing and evaluating all available heuristics to help people buy what they want as fast, cheap and reliable as possible.
How We Can Do It
In my entire life of studying and building companies, I’ve never seen a potential market size similar to what a customer-focused applied shopping AI can bring. Arriving there will require significant advancements in technology. Today, even everyday ordinary tasks, such as reliable price searching or shipping fees comparing for products on the web, are still incredibly challenging for AI agents. We’re heads-down and focused on making substantive leaps in those areas of advancement. They include:
- Artificial Intelligence: From specialized agents to advanced applied AI models, we’re building in-house the foundations to lead the next online shopping revolution
- Platforms: In order to collect propertary datapoints, achieve mass-market impact and shorten our system's iteration cycles, we must deploy our technologies as close as possible to the end consumer. The best way to do that is through the development our own platforms and interfaces.
- Safety: We’re committed to ensure that humanity AI future goes right. Safety, privacy and ethics are the key foundations for a healthy and safe technology environment.
- Customer-obsession: we are obsessed with doing whatever is best for customer, even if that means resigning short term profits for long term success. On the bigger picture, we believe that building amazing products to solve people’s real problems always pay off. Everything else is secondary.
- Infrastructure: building both hardware and software solutions is crucial to lead the AI shopping transition, empowering new and creative datapoints collection, manipulation and analysis.
Conclusion
In summary here is the first phase of our Master Plan:
- Build a stable consumer-centric shopping AI
- Deploy our systems into real world shopping platforms.
- Scale our platform’s to reach retail mass-markets.
