By Jennifer Heebner, Editor in Chief
Star Gems CEO Anish Desai has been in business since 1986, but his most innovative offerings are not even two months old. His Norcross, Ga.-based outfit, which started as a loose diamond house and transitioned into jewelry production and now custom work for retailers, recently invested in AI to aid clients. Enter his new GemArt, JewelBot, and VoiceGem services, three distinct jewelry-specific AI platforms that aim to help merchants “streamline operations and enhance customer engagement,” he explains. The trio debuted on March 15, 2024, to existing Star Gems customers.
“The intent of AI tools is to help users understand the power of technology and open their minds to how they can easily use it,” Desai explains.
GemArt is a tool to facilitate jewelry designs. Desai and his team trained an open or generative AI platform (think ChatGPT) to create jewelry designs when given prompts or requests. It took Desai’s team nine months of feeding AI hundreds of thousands of images of jewelry pulled from its own design database, then his team coded it further to enhance the prompt engineering used to create new designs.
In June 2023, he piloted the program to clients who were able to enter specific criteria to create jewelry designs that they could refine as they liked. The final products could serve as designs to make or simply inspire.
“Designers need inspiration, too, and GemArt can help users to create when the ideas aren’t coming to you quickly,” Desai explains. “Then you can still tweak them.”
To date, there have been no cries of foul play in the form of “Your AI platform copied my design” from the artisan community, but copycats have never needed AI to steal proprietary works. GemArt intends to be a design aid, but it cannot replace a well-trained designer and bench jeweler.
Feedback from users thus far is positive. An hour before yours truly interviewed Desai, a retailer in L.A. told him GemArt helped him lock in a sale in less than a minute.
“Their customer was even impressed,” says Desai. “The platform helped elevate the entire custom design experience.”
For now, Desai is making GemArt available for free to his existing custom design clients, but moving forward, he intends to create subscriptions and white label use of Star Gems’ software.
Next is JewelBot, a platform for users to create jewelry-related content, such as standard instructions for salespeople, intake rules for jewelry, store manuals, explanations about the characteristics of an Emerald, and more. JewelBot can produce these assets in seconds, and then users can further refine them. “JewelBot is for anything contextual,” says Desai.
Finally, there is VoiceGem, which is a work in progress. “We’re still training it, and it will be available by the end of the year,” says Desai.
VoiceGem is an audio platform where users’ speech is translated into other languages—a profoundly useful tool for those lacking multilingual associates.
“VoiceGem will eliminate language barriers because not everyone has a Spanish or Mandarin Chinese speaker on staff,” he says. “In a global market, VoiceGem will help retailers communicate with international customers.”
And if Desai and his company name sound familiar, it may be from his participation in the Jewelers Helping Jewelers (JHJ) Facebook group. There, he was tasked by JHJ founder Aleah Arundale to use his software Textmechat to create the Jewelers Crime Alert Network via text messages, which alerts jewelers in specific metropolitan areas to crimes near them.
For more information about Desai and his services, reach Star Gems at [email protected], 770-394-6727, or visit www.StarGems.com.
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