Hack Days are occurring at REI this week. This is an annual event where employees working in product, design or engineering get some flexibility to pursue ideas we think have potential, but aren’t officially on the docket. My team is working on an AI-powered voice assistant for store employees. The goal is to give our employees quick and easy access to ops process guidance and best practices while they’re in the midst of their work on the sales floor or warehouse, so they don’t need to hunt down a standard operating procedure (SOP) or find a small piece of information within a lengthy document.

Like all internal systems and apps at REI, this hack-days product has an outdoors-inspired hame: Carson. Named after legendary conservationist and author of Silent Spring Rachel Carson, the bot is coming along nicely.

So far, we’ve spun up a locally-hosted LLM that we’re training on operational process documents, retail knowledge base articles and other sources of internal data. Next up will be to build a conversational interface that we’ll plug into the apps on store employee mobile devices. There are still a lot of tweaks needed on the model, but I’ve found the responses to be quite good.

We might be at a point later today where I could test it with store employees. I’m excited to get some feedback that we could rapidly integrate before the final deadline and pitch presentation on Friday.