I used Cloudy Bay's AI Assisant to write my out-of-office message

This one popped up in my feed and I thought it deserved to be highlighted as an interesting use of Conversational AI.

The team at Cloudy Bay Wines decided to make it slightly easier for you to explain why you're out of the office this coming Friday evening – and every Friday evening across the summer.

Instead of the standard message, the Cloudy Bay team reckon you should have something bespoke - with a little AI-enhanced pizazz.

Here's how they've deployed their Chatbot on their dedicated microsite:

The first question it had for me was, I'm afraid to say, rather difficult to answer.

"Tell me how you're spending your Summer Friday?" asked the Chatbot.

"Errr," I thought to myself, "Working? Driving children around for various cricket training? Doing bedtime?"

I decided to try and go for a bit of coolness.

I suggested I'd be watching the Olympics.

The Cloudy Bay assistant did some thinking.

Then it asked me when I was going to be back on email.

Again, the actual answer is: It's permanently attached to me (generally).

But I also upgraded the reality to pretend that I'll be off email until the following Monday. I wondered if that might stump the (I presume, ChatGPT wrapper) in the background.

And here we have it.

My suggested out of office message is thus:

I'm currently off, soaking in the Olympic spirit and will be back on Monday. Like a Cloud Bay Sauvignon Blanc, I'm refreshing my senses! Cheers to a winning weekend!

Heh. Nice.

There's an option to actually send this to your email (I was prompted when I entered the microsite).

I clicked send.

And this fully branded proper email signature graphic arrived a moment later:

So if you're wondering where I am this weekend...

This is a nice use of (again, I presume) Generative AI to bring a smile to fans and help (re)connect them to the Cloudy Bay brand.

It does raise the question of whether other Wine brands might consider extending beyond simple microsite offerings like this to launch a much more fully featured Wine AI Assistant in due course.

I'm sure there must be some AI Wine Assistants ...

Yeah. Ok I thought I'd better go and look.

Right at the top of Google, there appears to be quite a lot of choice. The second on the list for me was AIVIN.

I checked it out and tested it with a question about my favourite Malbec :

Yes. That works. Very impressive. I know Catena Zapata but I haven't tried Zuccardi's Concreto so that's added some good value for me.

Like it. Good work team AIVIN.

I wonder if this is something the Cloudy Bay team might consider adding to their offerings later on?

For now, it's time for me to go and add the Out of Office note to my email for Friday...