Ex-Modiface CEO Wants to Improve Your Website With AI
The beauty world knows him as one of the pioneers who drove augmented reality for the sector at Modiface. Now Parham Aarabi’s next act also looks like a technical beaut, and not just for makeup. The tech start-up founder and University of Toronto professor of artificial intelligence is going full bore into e-commerce with his latest venture, Predictive Commerce.
With the platform, which launches Tuesday, Aarabi does what he does best — figure out how AI can solve real-world problems. Here, the company predicts human behavior, so brands can adapt their websites to achieve maximum effect.
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The genesis of the business didn’t stem from a particular eureka moment, but a simmering curiosity that nagged at him, he told WWD. He kept noticing how some retailers and brands struggle with the nuances of e-commerce and others didn’t. He just had to know why.
“It had bugged me for years, back at Modiface and especially at Modiface during the L’Oréal years that I stayed on as CEO [chief executive officer], that it was always a mystery,” he said, referring to L’Oréal’s acquisition of the beauty tech firm in 2018. “Same tool, similar sites, but different results.”
After he left Modiface in 2022, he had plenty of time to satisfy his curiosity. As professor of AI, he also had access to a team that could help solve the mystery.
“That team laser-focused on this key problem of simulating sites, and in doing these simulations, we were able to answer questions as to why, in certain cases, a virtual trial tool can help and why in other cases it actually may or may not help,” he continued. The particulars can change quickly, depending on any number of things, like market forces, trends and other outside factors. But he’s been building an AI that can keep up.
What helps is that others are just as curious, even vexed, about the same scenario.
The firm came together in earnest last January, and it has been building the core technology. But just three months later, while it was still in stealth mode, it somehow racked up nearly 80 clients. A sizable portion of the interest is probably due to the firm’s predictive powers.
According to Aarabi, Predictive’s accuracy rate was 50 percent in January, and it’s at a surprising 94 percent now. He expects to reach 99 percent by the summer. Predictive claims that its AI-driven platform is 1,200 times faster and 100 times more cost-effective.
The secret sauce is a combination of data scraped from the web, including underlying information, images and other aspects, so it can feed the model, plus reciprocal data from the brands it works with. If a client also comes back with a human testing result, Aarabi compares that to his models to improve the algorithms and the accuracy rate. When it comes to AI, especially machine learning, the more data the better.
The most obvious utility for the tech is A/B testing, which is an important part of maintaining any website or online experiences — and yet, it’s an area that’s often neglected.
“Most brands don’t A/B test enough; they go based on gut feelings, because A/B testing is expensive,” he contended. “[Our simulations] allow them to try so many different ideas and optimize their site profoundly more than what it is today. We’re seeing a tremendous impact in the quality of sites based on the starting point and after a few rounds of optimization.”
People might think beauty brands that already know Aarabi from his 15-plus years at Modiface, before he left in September, would be his main priority. But they would be mistaken.
“Surprisingly, it’s not the beauty brands, but fashion is one of our main goals. I think our largest vertical right now is the fashion space,” he added. “The second to that would be just non-beauty, non-fashion CPG [consumer packaged goods] brands that have sites, and then optimizing them is quite key.”
Several of his clients are Fortune 500 brands. Based on his experience, there could be a good reason for that.
“They want to do it very routinely, so every time they make a change on the site, they come to us and see if that’s good or bad.”
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