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Mode.ai launches ecommerce bot platform powered by computer vision.
Since coming out of stealth last year, Mode.ai has created bots for Levi’s, Louis Vuitton, and Pro Flowers, but today the computer vision startup announced it has launched a platform for small businesses and ecommerce merchants to create their own Facebook Messenger bots.

Since automated bots for sales or customer service have grown in popularity in recent years, there are dozens of bot platforms to choose from, but Mode.ai’s offering for small or medium-sized businesses (SMBs) leverages its computer vision AI, trained by millions of images from online retailers, to create bots with both text and visual search capabilities.

That means a user of the bot could take a picture of an item of clothing and have it matched to a similar item in a merchant’s shop. Most SMBs don’t have an inventory large enough to make visual search a huge value add, but in time, the goal is to use computer vision to power a fashion recommendation engine that enables a referral and revenue-sharing program for ecommerce businesses.

“The example I like to give is we’re powering a bot for the t-shirt company that doesn’t sell anything but t-shirts, but another company sells the pants or the jeans,” Mode.ai SVP Karen Ouk told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “They could promote each other’s items within their own bots.”