• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 10, 2025

Freedom Furniture executives learned quickly that artificial intelligence (AI) went from a good-to-have to a must-have technology after rapid growth expanded its catalog from 10,000 to more than 45,000 items.

Paula Mitchell, digital general manager at Freedom Furniture, believes updating its technology stack transformed its online ecommerce platform to power intuitive, hyper-personalized shopping experiences for consumers.

Sometimes marketers take technology for granted, but AI with all its challenges and forthcoming advancements will overhaul advertising further. Like it or not, AI will flag a new product or service in a search, video or display ads that the consumer didn't realize he or she needed. 

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, had a message for the technology industry early this month. The message was that AI agents that autonomously complete tasks will enter the workforce. It was buried in a blog post as he reflected on the second anniversary of ChatGPT and augmented general intelligence (AGI). 

"There is still so much to understand, still so much we don’t know, and it's still so early," Altman wrote. "But we know a lot more than we did when we started."

Although it sounds "like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it," he wrote, this year the world may see the first AI agents "'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies."

We have seen some pretty dramatic changes across the advertising industry in the past year, but Freedom Furniture, which operates about 60 stores in Australia and New Zealand, had one of those fortunate challenges — rapid growth that occurred mostly within 18 months. Shopper expectations for online purchases pushed the retailer into this change.

More people were buying online, forcing the company to re-evaluate its ecommerce technology stack to support change. Part of that change meant designing its digital channel with SAP Commerce Cloud in 2020, boosting the share of online sales from 6% to 25%.

The need for an AI-powered search product to improve the ability for consumers to search and discover products, as well as streamline the company's operations for its merchandisers led Freedom Furniture to Coveo's AI platform.

The collaboration to date, within about 30 days, has yielded a 15% uplift in customer sessions and a 5.5% improvement in average order value (AOV) year-over-year for customers engaging with onsite search.

The technology gave Freedom Furniture consumers while on its website predictive search features. The AI models went beyond popularity ranking on the site, and rather adjusted to shopper intent in real time. 

Specialized AI optimization learned from user behavior and product attributes to personalize and optimize all listing pages toward the retailer's key performance indicators (KPIs).

Product and content recommendations were made in-sessions based on real-time shopper behavior and intent cues from searches and clicks, using deep learning models.

A dedicated merchandising hub with visual tools and insight drove intuitive workflows to mix manual rules with AI in the product discovery experience to achieve the optimal business outcome.

The team at Freedom Furniture with Coveo will share the retailer's experience at the National Retail Federation 2025 show next week in New York.