Tell us about Sommify which you claim is an AI first for the wine industry?
Sommify is an AI company focusing on the wine industry that was founded in late 2022 in Helsinki, Finland - not the first place you think of when talking about wine.
The mission is very simple: to help grow the industry by making wine accessible through digital solutions. Our thesis is that by democratising world-class wine knowledge we can help both the seller and buyer to make decisions, both of which often find wine a difficult category.
To do this we replicated the wine knowledge of Julie Dupouy, a world-class sommelier, into an AI model we have packaged in different ways to sell to companies looking to have a competitive edge and help future proof their business.
There is a lot of PR and stories about AI which can be confusing - so can you set out why your AI model offers a genuine point of difference and could be a real cost benefit for wine companies?
I 100% agree. Like with any new-ish technology there is a lot of noise and companies have a tough situation to filter out firstly how they could use AI to their actual benefit and secondly how to then implement it. We do not see our AI model as the main point of difference. In the age of the fast progressing LLMs (Large Language Models) our niche focused AI model will outperform an LLM in wine-food pairing but not to a level that makes or breaks us as a company.
Anyone making strong claims about their superior AI often raises red flags because it is very unlikely you are outperforming some of the largest companies in the world.
AI has become a commoditised engine for solutions and we believe our real value lies in the solutions and experiences we offer. We are proud of the AI model we have built, but we know the actual difference is by knowing the industry and its challenges and addressing those in very tailored ways.
We see the future as every industry having its AI company that is very focused on one industry giving it an edge over general models, and we want to be that for wine. So with us the real cost benefit is knowing what works for the wine industry through extensive interviews, testing and research and then delivering high quality plug-and-play solutions specifically to serve the wine industry.
You are focusing your AI model on offering an AI solution for sales assistants for on-trade wine sales - why did you want to focus in on this area in particular?
Part of how the Sommify agent AI solution looks like
We are now focusing on building a solution for on-trade wine distributors because we learned through our research of the wine vertical that for many distributors on-trade wine sales is “20% of the revenue, 80% of the headache”. The sales process takes up a lot of time and resources because of the high customer volume with low per customer revenue.
We learned that in some markets sales people spend up to one to two hours just preparing offers. There are so many steps in the on-trade sales process that are very manual, repetitive but also complex. This is a perfect use case for AI.
We interviewed tens of distributors to understand the sales process and then created a solution that helps a wine seller each step of the way. Additionally, by doing this we feel we are able to help restaurants, hotels etc. enhance their wine-food experiences even though they could not afford a sommelier because of the supporting materials with advice on wine we generate. It all comes back to making wine accessible.
What have you done in order to create an AI model that offers an effective solution?
Sommify has been working with leading sommelier Julia Dupouy to help build its AI model to help the on-trade and suppliers sell more wine
We see the AI model at the core of the solution. Which is why we are referring to it as “Julie Dupouy as an AI”. We have therefore dubbed it an “AI sommelier”. To do this we started working with Julie in 2021 and have been able to use her knowledge to build a model that replicates her world-class wine experience and make it accessible to the trade . We started doing this before any of the big LLMs were launched. Having our AI model built around her knowledge differentiates us.
A very concrete example of this is how we have built our wine and food pairings based on her knowledge and have been able to compile a huge dataset of wine-food pairings so the AI model we built pairs wines in a similar way she does.
How did you get involved with Julie Dupouy and what has she done to help you?
When starting out we sent an email to 30 of the best sommeliers in the world. Eight of them wanted to join the company so we held a tournament that simulated the type of work they would be doing with us and Julie won. Most importantly she had the most accessible style and understood our mission of trying to reach the average consumer.
We definitely made the right decision. It has been incredible working with such a high level professional. She continues to help us build and improve the AI model. She also helps us on the UX side because she knows what is important and how to phrase things.
Can you give some examples of the type of knowledge and information she has been able to provide?
We realised as part of our model we needed to help find an on-trade solution that would help both staff in a restaurant sell more wine, but also help the distributor too. The staff can often be uneducated and unsure about selling wine. So we sent Julie a large number of wines and she created one-line descriptors for each one on how she would sell the wine and what makes it special.
We used these descriptors to train an AI model to recognise these key features and word them in a similar accessible way. So now when a distributor sells wines to a restaurant they can offer the restaurant a “cheat sheet” document that has an info package on each wine including which menu items in the restaurant work with the wine, information about the wine and a one-liner how their staff should sell it.
Can you give examples of the kind of tasks you have been able to automate that you say the on-trade finds annoying or boring to do?
Jacob Pichna, Sommify's co-founder, believes it is one of the first dedicated AI model for the on-trade and wine industry (photo Markus Wach).
The tasks vary a bit per market but the main areas we help in automating are: wine selection and material generation. What I mean by wine selection is that you might have a portfolio of thousands of wines that no human can realistically remember and we use that whole portfolio to select the perfect wines for the menu.
The salesperson can also just use it to narrow down the options, so for example we select the perfect 30 and they then manually narrow it down to 10-12 they want to offer.
The second part is material generation. We help create supporting materials for the offer. We can create a wine list where we automatically add margins and the right prices per glass for that restaurant.
They then also have a cheatsheet which helps the restaurant sell the wines by giving information on each of the wines, including food pairings and descriptors per wine. This can be printed out and put on a wall in the kitchen so the staff can quickly check and memorise key things about the wines they are selling.
They can also use our website to create a custom menu, with supporting documents, in a few minutes.
Is the idea to replace on-trade sales assistants with this AI model?
Absolutely not. Our job is to complement them and make their life easier. We want to scale up sales teams, not make people redundant. So instead of say sending out eight offers a day to their customers, they will suddenly be able to do 40 and focus on the relationship part more. On-trade sales is still a relationship business. AI can’t do that part so we stay in our lane and help sales teams focus on what is really important.
You have also worked with over 30 distributors across Europe to build your AI model - what sort of distributors were they in terms of size and what they do?
We interviewed distributors of different sizes and in different countries across Europe. We also tried getting opinions from different positions within the company. We also interviewed different types of distributors to get a better understanding of the whole space as there are distributors that do also other categories like spirits and beer and then there are 100% distributors that are more knowledgeable about wine and their sales staff only focuses on wine.
We also interviewed their customers to understand their pain points. This helped us create a concept that would serve the companies we feel would need the solution the most but are also most receptive to the idea of efficiency.
How did you choose which distributors to work with?
Sommify has worked with distributors across Europe to build its supplier AI model including Denmark's Den Sidste Flaske
I would like to highlight our first adopter of the solution Den Sidste Flaske in Denmark. We have worked with them on other projects too and it is a forward-thinking distributor which is reflected in its success. It is exactly the type of partner we like, willing to test different things and see what works.
There are also companies that want to keep the pilots and testing under NDAs. They fear that working with us would signal a lack of personal touch and their employees would get nervous about downsizing which of course is not the case. But as we learn to position ourselves and the product we will hopefully be able to bring more public examples of how it is helping companies.
You say you have worked with Tesco on this - what is Tesco using your AI model for and what results have they had?
Sommify has worked with Tesco to provide wine seletions to go with the food dishes as part of its Real Food range
We work with Tesco with our core AI (the Julie Dupouy as an AI sommelier model), not this product. We are helping Tesco make wine more accessible and build bridges between its food and wine offerings. We have done a number of seasonal campaigns with Tesco with great commercial success. We had a 40% cross-sell in one of the campaigns - where 40% of the people that bought a meal also added wine to their cart when our solution was present.
We currently also pair its wines to popular recipes on Tesco Real Food and there are of course some new exciting things in the pipeline with them.
Who do you see as the target customer that could benefit the most from what you do?
If you are a distributor then based on early traction and research then our sommify agent product is ideal for you. It will help you sell wine to on-trade more effectively, providing you have product data available on the wines for us to use and you are in a market where your on-trade customerscare about wine-food pairings. It is also important to have a sales team willing to use a digital solution. If these apply, you are able to scale up your on-trade wine sales with us.
What sort of savings and benefits are we talking about?
Based on early numbers sales teams are able to cut down 90% of the time they spend on offer creation which they can then use to increase their sales efforts. We are also working on other parts of the process like customer sourcing and outreach. Companies that use this will have a big unfair advantage on their competitors.
What is the cost involved in signing up and what do you get for that?
Depending on the size of the company it is a flat cancellable monthly fee ranging between hundreds and thousands of pounds. As we are still in the early stages of the launch the pricing is built in a way that it is a no brainer for companies when taking into account the savings.
Once we get enough data to prove our thesis we will adjust prices for new companies to better reflect the benefit. Currently we are looking for early adopters that will help us prove the benefit and in exchange they get a low cost solution with big impact.
Are you looking to expand the AI model into other areas of the wine industry?
We want to eventually become the AI company for the wine industry. We have identified 14 different areas where AI could have a considerable impact, just like with the on-trade sales process. We will go one by one “down” the wine industry vertical towards production.
Currently we are working on helping retailers sell wine to their customers (the complete “front-line”) and recently we moved one step down to help distributors sell to the companies selling to the “front-line”.
* You can find out more about Sommify at its website here.
* You can contact Sommify's co-founder and chief executive, Jacob Pichna on jacob@sommify.ai.
