Wine & Spirits
Nio walks a shopper through pairing a Cabernet for a holiday dinner, then suggests a value-tier alternative for the everyday bottle.
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Multi-location aisle advisory
Protect high-intent sales when your floor team is stretched.
AskNio puts an always-on, multilingual product expert in your aisle. Kiosk or QR. Text or talk. No app, no login.
Designed for Wine & Spirits, Nursery & Garden, and Specialty Pet chains where the buying decision is complex and information-led.
Apply for the 2026 Design Partner Cohort
5 NorCal chains · onboarding now
The Problem
The Expensive Questions
A premium case selection. A complex landscape plan. A sensitive pet nutrition question. When a shopper can't find clarity in the aisle, the sale walks out, and rarely shows up in POS data.
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Product expertise is uneven across locations, shifts, and seasons.
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Saturday is when buying intent peaks and expert coverage thins.
AskNio answers the question in the aisle, within approved boundaries, and flags the revenue-risk signal before the shopper walks out.
39%
of shoppers have left a store without purchasing due to out-of-stocks
Zebra Global Shopper Study
$15M
in turnover and training cost across a 6,000-employee retail workforce
Theatro retail training analysis
57%
have stopped shopping at stores with unhelpful or inexperienced staff
x-hoppers Consumer Survey, 2024
How it works
Multi-Location Aisle Advisory
AskNio is a voice product expert that lives in your aisle. Not a chatbot bolted onto your website. Shoppers talk to it the way they'd talk to your best floor associate. Nio answers in their language, within your brand boundaries, and hands the decision back to your team when judgment is needed.
Brand-Aligned Product Advisory
Grounded in your training playbooks, catalogs, and brand voice. Not a generic search tool.
Intelligent Floor-to-Staff Routing
Sends the remaining decision point and prior context to your team. Nobody starts over.
Built for Weekend Surges
Absorbs the repetitive demand that hits your floor during seasonal peaks and Saturday rushes.
Questions Nio Handles
What Nio Handles
Real questions Nio answers across three categories.
Wine & Spirits:
- Which Cabernet pairs with a 4-course holiday dinner for 12?
- What's a value-tier alternative to this $80 Burgundy?
- Is this bottle cellar-worthy for 10 years?
- What's the difference between Brunello and Chianti Classico?
Nursery & Garden:
- What grows well in full sun with dense clay soil?
- Is this specific fertilizer safe for my dog?
- When should I prune my climbing roses?
- What screening shrubs handle our hot summers?
Specialty Pet:
- My puppy has a sensitive stomach—what should I try?
- What is a novel protein and why does it matter?
- How much raw food should I feed a 40-pound active dog?
- Which supplement helps with senior large-breed hip and joint issues?
Proof
Demos
Three real store types. Hear how Nio handles everyday questions and keeps context.
Nursery & Garden
Nio helps a customer pick the perfect drought-tolerant plant for California's full-sun summer heat, and walks them through soil, watering, and fertilizer.
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Specialty Pet
Nio explains novel proteins to help a puppy with sensitivities.
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Hearing your category? The 2026 cohort is capped at 5 chains.
Apply for the 2026 Design Partner CohortAccess
Two Access Points,
One Knowledge Layer
Both surfaces support voice and text. Same brand voice. Same staff handoff destination.
Endcap Kiosk
A purpose-built touchscreen kiosk at high-traffic zones. Voice for hands-full consultation. Text for quieter moments. Staff handoff with full conversation context.
AskNio Go (QR)
Scan, talk or type. Private help in the aisle, on the customer's phone. No app, no account. Staff handoff with full conversation context.
Built for the Floor
Engineered for the Floor
Designed for loud aisles, seasonal peaks, and consistency across stores.
Acoustic Noise Isolation
Tuned for the noise floor of a working specialty store. Music, conversations, foot traffic. Voice falls back to text when needed.
Session Continuity
One conversation, every aisle. A shopper scans at the entrance, asks a question, walks to the back of the store, asks another. Same conversation, all the way through. No restart, no rescan.
Multilingual by Default
Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and more. Same store, same Nio, whichever language the customer brings. Configurable per location.
On-Screen Presence
Optional per store. Shoppers won't talk to a screen. They will talk to a person. When enabled, Nio appears on the kiosk as a friendly, on-brand presence, not a chatbot box.
Deployment
Multi-Location Deployment
Three phases. From signed agreement to first live aisle.
New stores live in two business days. No model training. No integration sprint. No six-week deployment.
01·
Ingest
Your product catalog, care guides, and brand rules.
02·
Tune
Answer boundaries, escalation rules, regional voice.
03·
Activate
Kiosks mounted, QR codes live, reporting on.
Phase 1: in-aisle product expertise. Phase 2: integrations mapped from pilot data.
Kiosk or QR · Text or talk · 2026 cohort opening
Privacy
Privacy Snapshot
Here’s what we keep (and what we don’t).
No Audio Retention
Voice is converted to text in real time. We don’t store raw audio recordings.
Session Context
We keep only what’s needed during the session to keep the conversation smooth.
Opt-in
Turn conversations into follow-ups, only when shoppers opt in.
No Mandatory Login
No account required to start.
We don't sell data. No ads. No creepy tracking.
FAQ
Operator FAQ
Built for operators who need controlled rollout, clear boundaries, and measurable pilot learning.
“Is this just a chatbot?”
No. Nio is an in-aisle advisory layer with kiosk and QR access. Voice and text, grounded in your product knowledge, with built-in staff handoff.
“How is customer data handled?”
Conversations are processed live, then aggregated into anonymized patterns for your insight reports. No audio stored. No individual tracking. Your catalog and brand knowledge stay scoped to your tenant.
“What's the IT lift on our side?”
None for Phase 1. We handle ingestion, tuning, kiosk provisioning, and QR rollout. Phase 2 integrations are scoped from pilot data, with no surprise infrastructure asks.
“How does Nio handle regulated or sensitive questions?”
Nio follows retailer-approved boundaries. Product education stays with Nio. Age verification, medical questions, and policy exceptions route to staff.
Apply
Apply for the Design Partnership
Five spots. NorCal-first onboarding.
“Technology shouldn't replace the human touch; it should protect it. I built Nio so expert staff can stay focused on the high-value relationships that make specialty retail worth visiting.”
— Bhaskaran Devaraj, Founder, AskNio
15 years of engineering leadership at LinkedIn. Co-founder and CTO at Omlet Stack. Connect on LinkedIn →