Ballin Knows Best (BKB) founders Ken Ballin and Jason Potts have launched the latest expansion of their BKB platform—their first-ever vendor specific chatbot. Russo Trading Company (RTC) has partnered with BKB to offer product support, tool recommendations and direct purchase links to the items in their vendor catalog. 

BKB is an AI-integrated online community and resource center for flooring installers, created by flooring pros Potts and Ballin, designed to provide quick answers to installation questions and connect industry professionals. 

The RTC artificial intelligence (AI) assistant features RTC’s entire product catalog and is designed to offer responses quickly. According to Ballin, this is solving the issue of unanswered questions that come in via social. 

“Anybody on the [RTC] staff can log into their socials and answer messages, but if somebody doesn't log in a few times during the day and you miss it, you're missing out on potential customers,” he said. “Installers especially, if I can't get a question answered, I'm just going to find it somewhere else. So, I have it set up where I see the questions coming in, and I see the answers, and I'm training it with references from their catalog.”

Inputting the product catalog requires making sure the products are up to date. Ballin said he works one-on-one with the manufacturer to upload not only the correct product information but also any information that might be missing or needs updating. To solve the issue of spreading misinformation, the BKB team has placed restrictions on the assistant not allowing it to scrape the Internet for information. Instead, it pulls information from the manufacturer catalog and through installer input only. 

The RTC AI assistant is currently in the testing phase and the BKB team is asking the flooring industry to assist in the teaching process by asking questions and allowing it to learn how users prefer to interact. 

Ultimately, the goal, according to Ballin, is to provide this customizable solution to other manufacturers. “We are hoping to eliminate unanswered, unread messages and automate that process for [manufacturers] so that their clients, users, and installers have faster access to the answers that they're seeking by using this technology,” he said. “We're not trying to take away somebody's job; we're trying to make it easier. By having an AI bot that we are actively training, we have the control. We are giving it feedback. We are telling it what to do and how we want to do it and when we want to do it so that it achieves the goals that these vendors may be expecting.”