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Last week we released Sales Skills - a new capability that lets AI Agents handle sales conversations, not just support tickets. This week, Empik launched it on their homepage during holiday shopping season.
That's not a typical enterprise software timeline. That's a retailer moving fast because they see where this is going.
Here's what they built: a gift advisor where customers stop fighting with filters and just describe who they're shopping for. "Gift for my brother, 27, into crime novels and board games, around 120 PLN." The AI Agent searches across Empik's entire catalog and pulls together recommendations that actually make sense together. Books, games, puzzles, graphic novels. Products you'd never find clicking through department menus for an hour.
You can talk to it with voice mode. It works like asking a friend who happens to know every product Empik sells.
Why we built Sales Skills in the first place
For the past two years, we've been building AI Agents that handle customer support end-to-end. We got very good at making sure these agents never hallucinate business decisions, never make costly mistakes, and actually complete the task without human intervention.
But we kept coming back to the same question: if our AI Agents can handle a complex return without screwing it up, why couldn't they help someone find a birthday present? When you strip it down, both are just conversations that need to end with something getting done. The technical architecture is identical - understand intent, access the right information, execute the right action. We'd already solved the hardest parts for support. Sales was the same engine, different dataset.
So we built Sales Skills.
Most retailers are still forming committees to study this
While most retailers are still publishing press releases about "exploring AI capabilities in retail" and forming committees to investigate what conversational commerce might look like in three years, Empik put this on their homepage during the holiday shopping season. That's not being cautiously early. That's being genuinely bold about where the market is going.
Why this proves something bigger
For us, this launch is proof of something we've believed for a while now. AI Agents aren't just for deflecting support tickets and saving money on operations. They can fundamentally transform how customers discover and buy products in the first place. The same Zowie platform that already powers customer service for brands worldwide can power entirely new kinds of customer experiences that weren't really possible before.
We started with support because that's where the immediate ROI was most obvious and the use cases were most clearly defined. But customer conversations don't stop at "where's my order" or "I need to return this." They never did. We're just finally at the point where the technology can handle the full range of what people actually want to talk about.
Go see it yourself
The gift advisor is live right now at empik.com. Describe someone you need to buy a gift for and see what it comes back with. It's available in Polish since that's Empik's market, but the same Zowie technology already supports over 170 languages for brands operating globally. This is really just the beginning - Empik's planning to expand conversational shopping across more categories throughout 2026.
