Every retailer is going to have AI. The real question is what yours can do once you have asked it something.
Pulling the data together. Working out which campaign is the right one. Building it. Answering the phone and the website while all of that is happening. Those four things eat most of a retail marketing week.
Today we are introducing Astro, the AI layer built directly into the AIQ platform. No new login, no separate tool, no new contract. Astro takes the slow parts of that week off your team and leaves the decisions with them.
Three things are true about all of it. Astro can act on what it finds. Every product you turn on makes the others smarter. And nothing leaves your account until a person says yes.
Ask a typical AI tool a question about your business and you get an answer back. A chart, a segment, a summary. Then the actual work starts. Export the list, build the audience, write the copy, design the email, set the schedule, route it for approval, send it.
Astro can do that work. Same question, same thread, finished campaign waiting for your review.
That difference explains a number worth sitting with. 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. Only 39% can point to a measurable bottom line result. Adoption already happened. The outcomes are still on the table.
They are still on the table because analysis was always the easy half. The retailers who win the next year are the ones whose AI can finish the job, working from something no one else has: their own customers, their own menu, their own history.
Shoppers are already living in this world. Nearly half of them used an AI tool to research a purchase in the last year, and only about a third fully trust what that AI tells them. The answer a customer gets from your store has to be right, and it has to lead somewhere.
Sources: McKinsey, The State of AI, 2026. Alchemer, 2026 Retail Report.
An AI can only act as well as what it learned from. Most systems in this industry are white labeled with a few months of history behind them, and a point of sale AI only ever sees point of sale data.
Astro can see the full picture:
What matters now is what your AI was taught with, and what it can do about what it finds.
Astro can build the campaign, then measure it.
Prompt Astro in plain English to generate audiences, copy, email HTML and workflows. Ask a business question and get live, exportable tables and charts, then act on the answer in the same thread.
Show me customers who bought concentrates twice last quarter and have not been back in 45 days. Chart their average order value against the rest of my base. Build an audience from that group and write a win-back campaign for them.
One prompt produces a finished audience, flow and email template, ready for your review.
What it makes smarter: everything Voice AI, Chat AI and Shared Memory pick up arrives here as something you can act on today.
Astro can learn your business once and know it everywhere.
Orders, inventory, customers and loyalty sync automatically. Upload files or links to train Astro on your store rules, policies and promotions, set account wide or overridden per location. Fifteen locations, one knowledge base.
One knowledge layer serves every Astro product, so there is no second setup. Knowledge gap reporting shows you the questions your AI keeps missing, which turns improving it into a task instead of a guess.
What it makes smarter: this is the connective tissue. Update your holiday hours once and the phone, the website and your campaigns all change together.
Astro can pick up every call, including the ones the team can't get to.
An AI agent answers your store phone in the language and voice you choose. It verifies callers, checks orders and live inventory, shares points balances and signs customers up for loyalty. Then it reports the intent, sentiment, resolution and full transcript of every call.
When a caller needs a person, Astro warm transfers them with a briefing on who is calling and why, so your team picks up already knowing the context. Voice runs on separate rails from SMS, so it is not filtered the way texting is.
For most operators, this is the first time they can see what their customers actually call about.
What it makes smarter: every call teaches Shared Memory something. What callers keep asking for becomes a campaign in Astro Prompt.
Astro can answer the shopper and hand your team a ticket.
Chat AI answers store, menu, product and terpene questions on your website, and after verifying the customer it can check their loyalty balance. Every conversation becomes a channel tagged ticket in one inbox, bringing website chat and inbound texts together with full channel attribution, so your team can see where every conversation came from.
It shares the same knowledge and the same tools as Voice AI, so a shopper gets the same answer online that they get by phone.
COMING SOON: Terpli AI Sales Agent flow built directly into Chat AI.
If you use Terpli, Chat AI and the Terpli AI Sales Agent will soon work as one conversation. Chat AI reads what the shopper is actually asking for. When the conversation moves from service into product discovery, the kind of question that starts with what's good for sleep or what should I try if I liked that last cart, Chat AI hands the thread to the Terpli AI Sales Agent inside the same chat window.
The shopper never changes tabs, never repeats themselves and never notices the handoff. They just go from getting an answer to getting a recommendation. Terpli brings its product intelligence to the discovery moment, Chat AI keeps the ticketing and the attribution, and the whole exchange lands in the same inbox your team already works from. Service questions and shopping questions stop being two separate experiences.
What it makes smarter: same brain as Voice AI, same inbox as your team, and every unanswered question routes straight back into Shared Memory.
Astro can take a new account from signed to running in eleven steps.
A guided setup takes a new account from welcome email to a working platform, with a persistent progress bar showing what is complete and what still needs attention. Skip steps and return anytime. Nothing stalls silently.
What it makes smarter: the setup answers you give here become the first entries in Shared Memory, so the rest of Astro starts with context instead of a blank page.
Every interaction gives Astro more context about your business: what your customers buy, what they ask about, and what campaigns actually work for them.
Voice and Chat can hear the questions your customers keep asking. Shared Memory can learn the answer once, for every channel and every store. Astro Prompt can turn that into a campaign the same day.
Astro is built to give your team more range. Every decision still runs through a person, and every part of it holds to the same rules:
Astro can draft the campaign, answer the call and write the reply. The call on what goes out is always yours.
Astro is ready to go live in AIQ accounts now. Talk to your CSM to get your first bucket built, or reach out to our team to see it running on your own data.
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