Case Study: Edmunds expands car-buying engagement with EPAM’s conversational commerce solution

Building a Conversational Commerce Interface for Car Buyers

Edmunds, an American online automotive information resource, sought to engage the growing number of users on voice and messaging platforms to increase sales and brand recognition. Their challenge was to create a conversational commerce interface that could provide real-time, intelligent responses to customer inquiries on Amazon Echo devices and Facebook Messenger. To achieve this, they partnered with their long-term technology vendor, EPAM Systems, to develop an AI-powered solution.

EPAM Systems designed and implemented a solution leveraging Apache Spark Streaming and AWS technologies, including Kinesis and EMR, to process messages. The architecture integrated the Wit.ai platform for natural language understanding, enabling the new assistant to respond to voice and text questions with expert content from Edmunds. As a result, Edmunds' services were introduced to a wider audience through Amazon Echo, allowing users to get personalized car-buying advice by voice. EPAM and Edmunds continued their innovation partnership by co-hosting a hackathon to further explore conversational commerce.

Edmunds