Some employees may know one genre or instrument type inside and out, but are deficient in other areas. Customers may walk into the store wanting an employee to help them, only to find the entire staff preoccupied with helping other customers. Or, in the past, store associates would spend a lot of time taking studio photos of used guitars to sell or manually processing sales-tax-free transactions.

Dalporto sees AI as a key part of the company’s toolkit in addressing some of the challenges that its roughly 13,500 employees across its 300-plus stores might encounter. This summer, the company launched a chatbot called Rig Advisor to help customers find the right products. And in November, it rolled out an employee training tool called Pitch Practice that simulates customer interactions.

The retailer has also built AI tools for processing tax-free transactions, incorporating the different associated laws and regulations, Dalporto said. “If you’re a nonprofit, you’re allowed to buy sales-tax-free. There are 50 different sets of laws and regulations in 50 different states; it’s very complicated, and it takes a long time,” he added. “We’ve used AI to automate that entire thing, and it’s gone from, like, two hours to a couple of minutes to do one of those transactions.” AI is also generating professional-quality images of used instruments, instead of setting up studio lighting in stores, he added.

“What are we trying to do? Free up time for associates,” said Dalporto. “They can spend more time with our customers, and we can unchain them from the cash register [and] make them way more knowledgeable and more productive.”

These are just a few examples among many ways the company is injecting AI throughout its business. The company is also working AI into its call centers and software development.

“AI is really permeating everything we do right now; it’s being super democratized across all of our businesses and all of our people to either make backend processes faster and easier, delight the customer, or make our associates more effective,” Dalporto said.

Dalporto explained how the company came up with Pitch Practice and Rig Advisor, and how these tools are aimed at transforming Guitar Center’s in-store shopping experience.

Pitch Practice was designed to train employees to educate customers on the thousands of products available in Guitar Center stores.

“The experience you get in a store, interacting with one of our sales people, is probably the most important reason people come into a brick-and-mortar store,” Dalporto said. “As an associate, you need to have product knowledge, you need to have customer service skills and you need to have sales skills.”

Dalporto said previously the company had created video or text-based training content with multiple-choice quizzes.

“We started to think about the materially different ways to create engagement with our associates and accelerate learning,” he said. “If I read a piece of paper and I take a multiple-choice quiz, and then I go out on the floor and engage with the customer, I may not be able to naturally recall that information and put it into practice. But if I’ve already had a conversational-type engagement on this content, then I’ve already put it into practice, and I’ll be that much better at it.”

Pitch Practice is a voice-to-voice AI app where employees can talk to a simulated customer walking through the door. The associate’s job in the simulation is to greet the customer, understand what they need, and engage in a back-and-forth conversation where they suggest equipment and add-on products. The app then scores the customer and passes that score and feedback to the employee and their manager.

“Now, the search associate has feedback on product knowledge, … and how they did in each of those areas, and they have something to work on for the day,” Dalporto said. “Also, that score is really interesting in that … [employees] create competition among the other sales people, and now they actually want to lean into this and get their scores up.”

The virtual musical instruments expert

Rig Advisor, the customer-facing tool on mobile devices, helps customers compare and search for gear available at their specific store location.

Dalporto describes the tool as a virtual product expert aware of all the inventory in the store. For example, he said a customer can tell the tool, “I have a gig this weekend, and I need a PA system, and I have a $4,000 budget,” and it will put together the right mixer, the right speakers, the right cables, the right mics and the right monitors that are in stock.

“It is an incredibly versatile tool that is designed to help customers explore sound, explore music, explore equipment and give them really, really tailored advice,” he said.

Rig Advisor, Dalporto said, was built to fill the void when a customer walks into a store and the associates are too busy with other guests to help them. “This is basically everything an associate can do, on your app or on your mobile device.”

Kassi Socha, a senior director analyst for marketing at Gartner, said she doesn’t expect tools like this to replace store associates completely, but that they should lighten their load to spend more time with customers.

“Retail employees are expected to do so much in today’s day and age: They foster an incredible customer experience, they help with personalization and product choice decisions, and they often facilitate inventory management and keeping the shelves stocked,” Socha said. “To take some of those tasks off their plate so that they can truly focus on an exceptional customer experience is something I think AI will benefit and extend.”

Customers can also tell it they want to sound like a specific artist, like Jimi Hendrix on “Purple Haze,” and it will tell them what equipment in the store could help them do so.

“It just winds up being a fun way for them to engage,” Dalporto said. “If I’m standing in the guitar area, and I’ve got a bunch of effects and amps and guitars, I can really go down deep rabbit holes of trying to explore blues sound, versus heavy metal, versus classic rock. … Our goal is to have people enjoying themselves and spending more time in our stores, and eventually, they will pay and buy stuff.”

While the tool was designed for customers, he said employees are also taking advantage of it. Many sales associates may be product experts in drums, but wouldn’t have the product knowledge to help a customer with microphones, for example. Now, some are using Rig Advisor to give customers recommendations in those areas they aren’t familiar with.

“Now our sales decisions can be experts in all product categories, and not just one or two product categories,” he said.

Socha said Guitar Center’s AI tools show the technology is working its way beyond apparel, shoes and fashion brands. While brands like Sephora and Zara have used recommendation tools in stores for years, Socha said brands with products that require more consideration have moved slower before adopting technology or trends to make sure the experiences are the right fit. Those include brands that sell musical instruments, cars or mattresses.

Guitar Center’s approach “is interesting because it’s taking a segment or a considered purchase — a higher-price point item — and making that purchase decision a little bit faster and easier,” Socha said. “There are some things that not every human can be an expert in, like pitch or tone, where a tool can become an expert.”

Still, she said it takes commitment from retailers to invest in training the tools they’re building to have great outputs.

“There are a lot of retailers risking their overall brand and customer experience by rushing to roll out tools that they didn’t properly train or ensure were ready to be customer-facing,” Socha said. “I’m seeing a lot of AI product-recommender tools that are almost gimmicky. … They’re not trained properly on the products themselves or the reviews that customers have given of those products.”