In luxury retail, the quality of every customer interaction depends on the knowledge, instinct, and experience of the individual staff member. That is a difficult asset to scale, and an even harder one to measure. The Canary Diamond Company recognised this challenge and partnered with NYP's Centre for Applied AI (C4AI) under the Applied AI Programme to solve this problem.

The result is a Generative AI-powered sales companion that supports frontline staff in real-time, integrating live inventory and product intelligence, giving management the visibility needed for consistent service excellence across the organisation. 

The Business Challenge

In high-touch retail, delivering a consistently exceptional customer experience depends heavily on the capabilities of frontline staff. Differences in product knowledge, experience and selling approaches often result in varying service quality, making it difficult for retailers to replicate the behaviours of their top performers and maintain consistency across the organisation.

Every customer interaction also presents an opportunity to uncover valuable insights - from buying intent and preferences to objections and decision cues. Yet, these insights are seldom captured or translated into actionable intelligence, limiting opportunities for coaching, continuous learning and informed decision-making.

Recognising these challenges, Canary sought a solution that went beyond process improvements by embedding intelligence directly into the daily workflow of its frontline teams.

The Solution

Lead Specialist, Benjamin Ma, Development Engineer, Kenneth Chew, Lecturer, Guo Rui Law and Senior Lecturer, Jimmy Chew from NYP, worked closely with Canary's team to ensure the solution was shaped by real frontline needs from the outset.

The system was designed around three core capabilities:

• Real-time conversational support: enabling frontline staff to engage customers more confidently by surfacing relevant product knowledge, inventory status, and contextual recommendations during live interactions;
• Customer interaction capture: structuring qualitative signals from each sales conversation, including preferences, objections, and decision cues, into data that management can act on;
• Governance and compliance: operating within stringent data consent and privacy requirements, ensuring responsible deployment in a brand-sensitive environment.

The solution was tested directly on the sales floor, with frontline staff involved throughout the iteration process. This close coupling of domain expertise and technical development ensured the system enhanced human-led client engagement rather than replace it. Complementing the project team, Final Year Project students from Diploma in AI & Data Engineering, as part of their FYP requirements, helped bring fresh perspectives to the programme, and gained real-world AI deployment experience in a commercial environment.

Outcomes and Impact

The collaboration produced measurable improvements across sales operations, workforce development, and management decision-making such as:

• Reducing time spent on manual inventory checks and back-office coordination, freeing staff to focus on higher-value client engagement;
• Improving end-to-end visibility across the sales journey, giving management timely insights into process bottlenecks, product-level friction, and service inconsistencies;
• Faster onboarding and upskilling of sales staff, with real-time guidance and best-practice cues embedded directly into daily workflows;
• Transformation of individual sales know-how into organisation-wide capability, shortening learning curves and raising baseline service standards.

Beyond operational gains, the project delivered a modular, scalable architecture adaptable across store formats, product categories, and customer segments. For the retail sector, this is more than a proof of concept. It is a practical, deployable blueprint for how businesses can harness Generative AI to elevate both staff performance and customer experience, responsibly and at scale.

This project was recognised at the Retail Reimagine Conference by Senior Minister of State Low Yen Ling and mentioned in The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao, and has also been shortlisted for the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce Award 2026.