Please describe your company and your position there.
I am the Product R&D of a non-profit company
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
Consumer protection non-profit
What specific goals or objectives did you hire NineTwoThree to accomplish?
Deliver MVP of conversational chatbot with RAG architecture
How did you find NineTwoThree?
Online Search
Why did you select NineTwoThree over others?
How many teammates from NineTwoThree were assigned to this project?
6-10 Employees
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
An MVP application that met requirements was delivered on time.
Vendor was able to adapt to reduction of scope.
Vendor successfully contributed across LLM development, frontend & backend application development, and UX/UI.
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
Excellent centralization of tasks in Monday.com and regular touch points with internal team to align project management boards and stay on track
Tasks were organized and completed on time.
AI development requires ongoing experimentation - there were experiments that went better and experiments that went less well. Coordinating experiments across teams proved challenging at first, however we improved with time.
I appreciated the regular feedback exchange with 923 management - it allowed us to make process changes along the way so that we could collaborate more smoothly
What was your primary form of communication with NineTwoThree?
Email or Messaging App
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
Fabulous communication from executives, and care to ensure project was running smoothly.
They showed impressive project management coordination across teams in many time zones.
Commitment from engineers to meet development deadlines and work after hours as necessary to drive project to completion.
Are there any areas for improvement or something NineTwoThree could have done differently?
On at least one occasion, responsibilities were rotated among engineering team members and some knowledge/context was lost. I wish 923 had spent more time on careful knowledge transfer when team members swapped responsibilities.
Collaboration with our DevOps org proved challenging at times (most of this was on us). It's a team that likes to do things its own way, not always the best way. 923 came in with different (and probably better) ideas for setting up the right environments -- which ended up clashing with the internal team's preferences. Though I know 923 was probably right, these decisions were outside of the scope of the project and I wish they had been able to conform to the internal group's preferences sooner.
Imagine shopping for a mattress and being able to give an AI chatbot your preferences such as: “I’m a tall person who sleeps on my back, what is a good mattress for me?” and getting a personalized recommendation.
For over 80 years, CR has earned the reputation of delivering unbiased and well researched product information to consumers. CR is well-positioned to deliver a powerful AI chatbot that can help consumers get their product questions answered with reliable, unbiased information.
CR’s innovation team was quick to move towards building an AI-powered tool that can help people doing product research get to the right answers faster. They hired NineTwoThree as their development partner because of our engineers’ proven AI/ML expertise launching similar systems to hundreds of thousands of users in production, as well as our experience working with innovation labs from both public and non-profit companies.
A shopper should be able to ask AskCR a question and get a personalized recommendation in the voice of a CR expert.
The biggest challenge for our teams was building a sophisticated RAG system that could understand user’s ambiguous queries and then elegantly find answers and relevant information from CR’s vast database of articles, ratings and reviews.
To do this AskCR has to understand the nuance and intent of a consumer’s question and provide relevant and meaningful information to inform their purchase.
In June 2024, CR announced the successful beta launch of AskCR, available by invitation only. NineTwoThree was excited to bring our experience in AI/ML projects to this cutting-edge use of AI and support CR’s Innovation Lab team in building the next generation of CR tools that help consumers navigate the market.
