AI Reviews Summaries

The AI Review Summaries feature is a powerful addition to the Emplifi Ratings & Reviews suite. It automatically generates AI-written summaries of product reviews, synthesizing key themes, sentiments, and recurring mentions into an easy-to-read paragraph or bulleted list.

Whether you are looking to reduce time-to-insight for shoppers, improve buyer confidence, or accelerate purchase decisions on product pages, AI Review Summaries provide an aggregated, at-a-glance read of peer opinions.

How It Works

AI Review Summaries analyze the reviews collected for a given product at either the Virtual Parent Code (VPC) or the individual SKU level. The generation process follows these steps:

1. Threshold Verification: The system checks if the VPC or individual SKU has accumulated a minimum of 50 reviews. This hard threshold ensures that the AI has a sufficient dataset to generate a reliable and accurate summary without over-indexing on outlier opinions.

2. Data Sampling: Once the threshold is met, the system samples up to 100 reviews from the product to form the analysis dataset.

3. AI Generation: The sampled reviews are sent to an external AI Summaries API. The AI synthesizes the text, determining the aggregate sentiment and identifying recurring themes.

4. Publishing: After processing, the generated summary is saved to the Emplifi database and surfaced either through the Emplifi widget on your product detail pages (PDPs) or via the TurnTo API.

Feature Requirements and Limitations

• Minimum Review Count: Products with fewer than 50 reviews will not receive a summary. There is no partial summary generated for products below this threshold.

• Language Support: Summaries are not restricted to English. They are generated in the language defined by the default_locale property in your site settings.

• Granularity: Summaries are generated at the VPC level. Individual SKUs only receive their own summaries if they are not part of a VPC. Topic-level breakdowns are not supported in the current release.

• Moderation: At this time, AI-generated summaries cannot be manually edited by the customer.

Enablement Process

AI Review Summaries are currently rolling out to Emplifi Ratings & Reviews customers. The enablement process currently requires assistance from the Emplifi team.

1. Contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to request AI Review Summaries.

2. Your CSM will arrange for a sample extraction (e.g., on 10 of your top SKUs).

3. Review the generated samples to ensure they meet your expectations.

4. Upon your approval, the Emplifi team will fully enable the summaries for your catalog and, if applicable, adjust your widget layout to display them.

Note: A self-serve hide/show toggle is currently in development. Once released, this will allow administrators to control the visibility of the summary directly from the Emplifi admin interface.

Frequently asked questions

What is a VPC?

Virtual Parent Code (VPC) is a grouping identifier that links related product SKUs together. Summaries are primarily generated at this aggregate level to ensure sufficient review volume.

What happens if the AI fails to produce a summary?

If the API encounters an error or fails to return a result, a built-in retry mechanism will re-queue the VPC/SKU for reprocessing up to 3 times. If all attempts fail, no summary is produced for that product.

How current are the summaries?

Currently, summaries are manually rerun by CSMs for a site every 14 days. An automated remediation process is planned for the future, which will automatically refresh a summary if a product's review count changes by more than 25% and the existing summary is more than 14 days old.

What happens if a product's review count drops below 50 after a summary is generated?

The existing summary will remain visible on the product page. Automated removal or regeneration behaviors for this scenario are being evaluated for future updates.

Do I need to change my website code to display the widget?

If you are already using Emplifi widgets, no customer-side implementation is required. A quick change by our team in the configurator will make the summary visible.