Capri group adopts artificial intelligence, does not lay off, rather hires

Artificial intelligence revolutionises Capri Group's customer care, thanks to the introduction of two autonomous agents who work closely with workers in flesh and blood and brain. The experience was illustrated at the Agentforce Summit Milan organised by Salesforce, and hosted at Bocconi University, and was presented by Marianna Colella, Group Partner and Marketing and Digital Director of Gutteridge, and Fabrizio Minichino, E-commerce & Digital Innovation of the Capri Group.

"The introduction of artificial intelligence," says Marianna Colella, "frightened us at first. But today we judge it positively because it has induced us not to reduce, but to strengthen the workforce, achieving interesting results'. The group now plans to extend the model to other sectors, such as It, administration and even style.

The project started about a year ago, during a phase of internal customer care reorganisation. Suddenly, for various reasons, the staff of that service had been reduced to just two professionals who could not cope with the entire load of online customer care contacts. It was then decided to introduce AI agents to handle the most frequent requests, such as order tracking or return procedures. For this purpose, two young engineers with a master's degree from Deloitte's Digita Academy in San Giovanni a Teduccio were hired, who created the platform and launched the new system.

Marianna Colella

 The results were immediate: agents were able to handle almost all first-level requests independently, allowing the human team to focus on higher-value activities. Over time, functionality was expanded to include operations such as changing shipping addresses, rescheduling returns or managing codes for in-store order collection. Today, the system is able to handle about 50 per cent of customer enquiries autonomously, while a portion is forwarded to operators for more advanced support.

Contrary to initial fears, the introduction of AI was not perceived as a threat by the team, but as a concrete support tool: by eliminating repetitive requests, the digital agents allowed the operators to devote themselves to more complex and qualitative interactions, becoming in fact a true 'digital colleague' within customer care. A distinctive element of the project was also the strong involvement of young talent: thanks also to the collaboration with the Federico II University of Naples.