Inside Kingsdown’s innovative sleepLAB experience at the Las Vegas Market, visitors can see what fashion trends inspired certain lines, how the inside of the products work and now, crAIg.
CrAIg is a sales training RSAi app created for retail sales associates featuring an AI-powered version of Craig Wilson, Kingsdown’s vice president of sales, training and education. The app allows retail salespeople to instantly request and receive helpful information generated by AI and is the first of many AI marketing support tools to come that the company is creating under Kingsdown RSAi.
According to Gary Towning, Kingsdown’s vice president of marketing, this will not replace Wilson and the training he does for each rollout of each of Kingsdown’s retailer partners. But this tool is different because it empowers sales associates in the field with unbranded answers.
“An important part of building a relationship with a retailer is letting them know we are always available to support them,” Towning says.
RSAs can ask questions like “How do I sell a split head?” or “How do I sell a motion base,” among many others.
What makes this tool useful for Kingsdown sales is that instead of having a program like ChatGPT pulling information from all corners of the internet, Kingsdown built a custom GPT that they can plug information into in a controlled environment.
“Businesspeople and consumers are relying more and more on AI Large Language Models-based topic research, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, MS’s Copilot and Perplexity,” Towning says. These rely on public domain information and therefore can have mixed results/reliability, especially with very narrow and deep query topics. What Craig does in his in-person training is incredibly specific and bespoke to the retailer that we’re launching with,” Towning says. “The product we are selling through them is unique in many different ways. You cannot use AI to take care of things that are so specific and require that kind of hands-on training, but what we developed crAIg for is from a post-training perspective. RSAs can query it on nonbranded things.”
He adds that just because AI is available, Kingsdown wants to be sure they’re using it in a controlled environment with the right kind of data.
According to Wilson himself, the process wasn’t as simple as plugging certain information into a computer and getting a result.
“I’ve been involved on the data collection side of it, and it’s been fun because I’ve been with Kingsdown now for 15 years and it’s strange to think about all this video content that’s sitting out there and to be able to be put into an active module that just kind of pulls from all of that knowledge. The presentations I’ve given over the years have been wide-ranging, but much of it is specific to a retailer — and we didn’t include those things. But I’ve given sleep seminars or general pieces around factory tours or processes, or even just general selling tips and we were able to take all those years of knowledge and history — things I’ve even forgot that I’ve delivered — and it can live forever in crAig.”
Towning adds that Kingsdown will keep updating the dataset as new products roll out and any new sales training insights.
We will be adding a voice to text query and text to voice feedback to the sleepLAB for the winter Las Vegas Market. We have also created a dataset AI.Reveiws of our all our 10,000+ consumer reviews which are public domain but offered up in a more brand-controlled AI environment, so RSAs can use as support in a sales conversation.”
