Episode Transcript
Hunter Zhao (00:01.39)
Welcome to the AI Chronicles. I'm your host, Hunter Zhao. Today, we're going to dive head first into how a UK-based marketplace company called Party Without Plastic is using AI inside their own business. And we'll share the exact steps you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before I dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside your own company or struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating?
speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI agent for you, eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you it'll be the biggest time-saving decision you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time and frustration it's going to take you well, just isn't worth it.
It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. Schedule a consultation today. again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Now today I have with me on the show Lorraine Allman, who is the founder of the award-winning accredited marketplace Party Without Plastic. Welcome to the show, Lorraine.
Lorraine Allman (01:21.287)
Thanks very much, Hunter. Great to be here.
Hunter Zhao (01:24.406)
Awesome. So Lorraine, tell me, how did Party Without Plastic come to be?
Lorraine Allman (01:29.287)
Okay, so it's quite an interesting one, so you have to bear with me just for 30 seconds. The spark that led to Party Without Plastic actually came from my teenage son, who during the first COVID lockdown discovered that we had hedgehogs in the garden. So I told you to bear with me on this. After learning they were vulnerable to extinction, he became really passionate about the plight of the hedgehog. And for the last nearly six years, he's worked really tirelessly to raise awareness, take action, and try and stop their decline in numbers.
And what he has showed me over those six years is that one person can absolutely make a difference. And he'd often refer to the decline in head job numbers as a microcosm of what's happening to the planet as a whole. And it made me question, what am I doing personally to help? And as a parent and someone who is experienced in supporting families, early years education.
I realized that the growing party industry has so many single-use plastic products that actually that was also part of the problem. So the idea for a marketplace bringing together sustainable party-free supplies all in one place as well as supporting small businesses kind of came to life. So that was actually my inspiration behind Party Without Plastic.
Hunter Zhao (02:49.066)
Interesting, that's quite an inspirational set of events, I guess. People don't usually think about that, but being environmentally conscious has certainly been a very major topic in our own culture. guess motivating people to actually take action, not just being aware, that's the next step over. So most certainly something I think we all need to be aware of, we all need to do.
Lorraine Allman (02:54.538)
Hmm.
Hunter Zhao (03:17.966)
And I know you're using AI over at Party Without Plastic, right? And I think that's fantastic what you're doing. But before we dive into that, tell me, why did you decide to start using AI in the first place? And what challenge were you trying to solve?
Lorraine Allman (03:22.086)
Yes.
Lorraine Allman (03:26.705)
Mm.
Lorraine Allman (03:31.88)
You know what, it's a great question actually. And actually it was one of the biggest challenges we faced and it was a massive decision for us as to whether we were going to bring AI into the business or not. Because we weren't initially, when we started off, we weren't using AI at all. And one of the biggest challenges for us as a green business is that AI itself has a very real high carbon footprint. You'll see that everywhere. And there's a bit of a race going on at the moment for sure on different big players.
around trying to reduce that carbon footprint down. But it's something that felt very contradictory at first. How can we, as a business, dedicated to producing simple use plastic, promoting sustainable celebrations, how can we justify adopting a tool that actually carries its own really high environmental costs, certainly as it stands at the moment? So we decided to approach AI through the lens of using technology for good.
So we thought if we can harness it to amplify sustainable choices, educate people and shift behaviors away from party supplies that create plastic pollution, for example, then the benefits absolutely outweigh the footprint. So it's about for us, it's about being conscious, intentional and transparent in terms of how we use AI.
So we use AI with our sustainable party planner, which has been quite a long time in development, but also we use it for analyzing trends and social content. But as I say, it's very much through that lens of using technology for good.
Hunter Zhao (05:17.878)
I see, I see. So can you walk me through the AI usage and adoption in your organization step by step and what does this process look like? What are you, know, the examples of problems that you've solved with AI, for example?
Lorraine Allman (05:24.697)
and move.
Lorraine Allman (05:34.728)
Oh yeah, absolutely. if I take the last one first, so take the party one, because that's kind of the most recent to see and it's very much sort of now in the public domain, so your listeners can try it out themselves, have a look at it. What we did there was we couldn't build that sort of within our own sort of company because we didn't have all the expertise there. So we collaborated with another company.
who was already working that field. know, transparency, they handled a lot of the heavy lifting on the technical side. So the building and the training of the system was very much sort of led by them, but with our input. And our main role was about ensuring the quality, integrity of the responses. You know, when you're giving people advice on sustainability, accuracy is everything in a hallucinated response that suggests
you know, an eco-friendly alternative that isn't actually sustainable would be hugely misleading and of course very damaging for us and our mission and our brand. So we worked very closely with the other company to validate outputs, stress test responses and keep the AI grounded in what we considered to be trustworthy, sort of verified resources. And of course we, you know, we continue to do that. So that was around about
sort of four months I suppose. I mean we were able to move quite quickly because you the other company had a lot of systems already in place. So that was there but before we brought that on we were already then using it on other aspects and particularly as I've mentioned before about analysing trends and social content. So we will track, I mean in terms of what that looks like, we would track
keywords both in external systems but also as well as in platforms themselves so something like Instagram where we're quite present. That can help us analyze posts, comments, hashtags, you know all that sort of thing, spot patterns potentially identifying where trends could go viral and we feed in data on past sales and search data from our Google Analytics which can then help us predict
Lorraine Allman (07:52.952)
which areas are likely to peak at sort of key points in the calendar, which is really important for us, as you might expect, things like, you know, celebrations, know, Christmas, wedding seasons, and so on. And the AI also gives us insights into what kind of content and styles perform best with our competitors. So that's very helpful. And once we have the idea of the trends, then we look to AI
to help us work up content for our socials. And that saves like a huge amount of time for us because we craft it different content for different groups according to the audiences that we're trying to meet and supports us with things like SEO and hashtags. The one area we don't use it for still very much is visuals and mockups because we feel that it is still.
quite a way off from what we need and what I would consider to be still fairly obviously AI. The only thing I would say about that is we never take exactly what AI produces for us, particularly on the social side. There's always some tweaking needed. We always bring in a personal touch and that at the moment, you know, that's something that we do.
So that's pretty much, yeah, the sort of three areas of how we use it, the planner, the analyzing trends, and the social content.
Hunter Zhao (09:26.456)
Interesting interesting. So do you have a custom? Application that this partner built for you, or is it something okay?
Lorraine Allman (09:37.434)
Yeah, so it's a custom application. It's a combination. mean, if you bring these guys on, I'm sure they'll talk in more detail about it. without giving too much away, basically, it is absolutely a custom application. it's kind of, from my perspective, it's about taking the best bits of all those different assets of Gemini, of ChapGP.
GPT-5 of lots of different things and making it bespoke. And that's where we worked really, really closely with them. And what we've launched through this is the UK's first, in fact, we believe it's actually the world's first AI sustainable party planner. We have not been able to find anything like it, but it's built absolutely bespoke. It's not using any one AI platform.
Hunter Zhao (10:28.462)
I see, I see. So I guess in terms of impact that perhaps you could quantify or highlight after you adopted AI, perhaps its operational efficiency gains, perhaps its new ideas, new ways to analyze data, or even improved revenue streams or exposure on your platform. So what have you seen so far in regards to results?
Lorraine Allman (10:30.151)
Thank you.
Lorraine Allman (10:50.023)
Okay, great question. It's still fairly early days for the party planner, the sustainable party planner in particular. You know, we've barely been going, not even a month yet. So it really is very new. So we're very much in monitoring mode for that. We are getting data on how people are using it, what they're looking for. We build in feedback.
when they're using it as well. So we're going to be using that data to improve the system as well. But what that service provides, what we were able to do was also integrate our products from the marketplace into those AI tools as well. So it's very personalized to us as a business. And we've definitely seen an uptick in terms of sales coming through from that, but it's still very, very early days yet in terms of the planet.
Where we have seen some really exciting results is actually in relation to our social content, particularly. So by using AI to analyze the trends, help shape our storytelling, we've seen engagement grow right around 200 % in the last couple of months in particular. And that's as a result of a mix of better content, smarter timing, and making sure we're also joining conversations that people care about. And for us, I think we feel AI has
definitely accelerated that learning curve for us.
Hunter Zhao (12:17.198)
I see. I see. Well, thank you for sharing Lorraine. So what are Party Without Plastics upcoming AI initiatives? And where do you see AI playing a role in your operations next?
Lorraine Allman (12:24.205)
yeah, there's always something else to be working on, isn't there? And I think for now our main focus is about keeping the sustainable party planner under review, checking it's delivering reliable, genuinely sustainable advice, reducing any hallucinations and so on, and exploring how people actually using it. And that kind of data is really important, as I've said, in terms of helping us work out how the system is then developed further.
Also want to make sure that we strike the right balance between scaling the positive impact AI can have, but also keeping an eye on its environmental footprint and staying true to our core mission of reducing single use plastics when it comes to celebrations. So that's something we're also kind of watching very, very carefully as well at the moment to see how the main players are actually, you know, working to bring that footprint down. So I think...
As that happens, we will look further at what kind of happens next. But the main thing at the moment is very much keeping under review the data that we've got for all getting from the Sustainable Party Planner.
Hunter Zhao (13:36.078)
I see, I see. So where should people go Lorraine to learn more about Party Without Plastic?
Lorraine Allman (13:43.259)
very kind of you to ask. Thank you. They're very welcome. Go and visit partywithoutplastic.com to go and have a little nosy around the marketplace, see what we're all about. There's lots of information about the company, our values, a blog and so on. So very welcome to do that. Or I'm equally happy to be connected with on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active over there. So linkedin.com and you'll find me at Lorraine Orman.
Hunter Zhao (14:08.014)
Amazing. Thank you so much Lorraine. It was great to have you on.
Lorraine Allman (14:12.261)
You're very welcome.
Hunter Zhao (14:14.059)
And if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, don't try to do it yourself. Remember, the time and stress that AI will cause just isn't worth it. Schedule a call with GPT Trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Go to gpt-trainer.com to schedule your consultation. Signing out for now, have a wonderful rest of your day. And looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
