PNJ: Enhancing Jewelry Shopping with GenAI-Powered Intent & Visual Search on AWS

Industry

Retail – Jewelry

Technology

Amazon Bedrock

Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon S3

AWS Lambda

AWS Step Functions

Amazon API Gateway

Serverless Compute

GenAI Metadata Extraction

Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Translate

OVERVIEW

As one of Vietnam’s most iconic jewelry brands, PNJ has built a reputation for craftsmanship, sophistication, and exceptional customer experience. With the rapid shift toward digital shopping, PNJ sought to redefine how customers discover products online—moving beyond traditional text search toward a more intuitive, image-driven, AI-powered search experience.

To achieve this vision, PNJ partnered with Renova Cloud to build a GenAI-powered Intent & Visual Search on AWS (Amazon Web Services). This modern, multimodal system empowers customers to find jewelry using natural-language descriptions, uploaded photos, or a combination of both, unlocking a new level of convenience and personalization.

KEY CHALLENGES

• Product scale and complexity outpacing discovery capabilities: PNJ’s rapidly expanding catalog, with frequent new collection launches and thousands of visually nuanced SKUs, made it difficult for both customers and staff to effectively navigate and differentiate products using traditional tools.
• Slow product knowledge adoption for sales associates: The volume and visual subtlety of products extended onboarding time for new hires, delaying their ability to confidently understand, recommend, and sell products.
• Ineffective search and browsing experience for digital customers: Conventional keyword-based search and category browsing failed to capture the subjective, visual nature of jewelry preferences, limiting relevance and usability.
• High friction in product discovery and decision-making: Customers were forced to rely on extensive scrolling and manual comparison, resulting in engagement fatigue, longer decision cycles, and difficulty narrowing options by design style, stone shape, or aesthetic intent.
• Lost engagement and conversion opportunities: The absence of intent-aware and visual discovery mechanisms increased session abandonment and reduced the overall efficiency of the purchase journey.

SOLUTION

To address these challenges, PNJ and Renova Cloud designed a production-ready, multimodal GenAI search platform capable of delivering fast, intelligent, and personalized product discovery.

1. Architecture & Deployment

The solution integrates multiple AWS-managed services into a unified search pipeline:

• Amazon Bedrock: Generates embeddings for images and text, enriches product data with AI-generated visual descriptions, and powers multimodal intent matching.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (vector database): Stores and indexes embeddings for large-scale similarity search across PNJ’s extensive product catalog.
• Amazon S3: Serves as the central storage for product images and uploaded customer images, as well as product metadata files.
• AWS Lambda & Step Functions:.Core computation and orchestration, coordinates preprocessing workflow for new data ingestion and query recommendations
• Amazon API Gateway: Provides an entry point for secured API traffic between client and server side.
• Amazon CloudWatch + AWS X-Ray: Thorough monitoring and observability capability for PNJ teams
• Amazon DynamoDB: Storing system’s metadata for each processing phase for tracking and monitoring
• AWS Secrets Manager, IAM & KMS: IAM controls access, KMS encrypts data, and Secrets Manager protects credentials—together forming the security foundation of the architecture.

2. Search Capabilities Delivered

• Image Search: Customers upload a jewelry photo to find similar styles instantly.
• Intent Search: Natural-language queries interpret style, material, shape, occasion, or design preferences.
• Hybrid Search: Combines image + text for best-match results (e.g., “Similar ring but in rose gold”).
• Automated Metadata Enrichment: GenAI creates standardized visual descriptions that improve catalog accuracy and downstream analytics.

BENEFITS

1. Financial Impacts

Accelerated Sales Readiness & Reduced Training Costs:
In traditional retail environments, sales associates are expected to memorize extensive product catalogs and complex product attributes. As PNJ continuously introduces new jewelry collections and hundreds of SKUs, this approach leads to prolonged onboarding cycles, higher training costs, and inconsistent product consultations. Traditionally, new sales associates require approximately 4–6 weeks to become familiar with the product catalog and confidently assist customers.

By implementing a GenAI-powered Intent Search and Visual Search platform, sales associates can instantly retrieve relevant products using natural language descriptions or reference images. The system achieves 88.5% Top-3 search accuracy, allowing both experienced and newly hired staff to quickly identify suitable products without manually navigating large catalogs. Acting as an AI-assisted knowledge augmentation tool, the solution reduces reliance on memorization and enables employees to access product knowledge in real time, significantly accelerating the path to sales readiness.

Business Outcomes:

• 20–25% reduction in onboarding and training time for new sales associates compared to the traditional 4–6 week learning cycle
• Faster product discovery enables staff to focus on customer engagement and personalized recommendations rather than manual catalog searches
• Improved access to product knowledge increases conversion opportunities during in-store consultations.

2. Operational Efficiency

Eliminating Manual Catalog Navigation & Fragmented Search:
Previously, product discovery required navigating multiple catalog systems, product sheets, and internal tools—creating friction for both customers and sales staff.

The AI-powered Intent and Visual Search platform unifies product discovery across digital and physical channels, enabling fast and intuitive product exploration based on customer intent and visual references.

Operational Improvements:

• Unified multimodal search (text + image) across e-commerce, mobile apps, and digital storefronts
• Scalable architecture supporting millions of SKUs with high-speed retrieval
• Real-time analytics dashboards allow product managers and P&L owners to monitor customer intent, demand patterns, and search behavior
• Automated catalog enrichment workflows improve product data quality and reduce manual data management efforts

3. Performance Improvements

Faster Customer Consultations & Improved Shopping Experience:
Slow product lookup and unclear recommendations are common causes of customer journey drop-offs in both online and assisted sales environments.

With optimized AI retrieval and inference pipelines, the solution delivers sub-5-second response times across search modalities, enabling faster product discovery and more efficient consultations.

Customer Experience Improvements:

• Reduced product consultation cycles to under 20 minutes per customer interaction
• Faster responses improve both in-store advisory experiences and online product discovery
• AI-powered similarity matching enhances search relevance for both image and text queries
• Robust visual recognition handles lighting variations, angles, and image quality differences

Performance Metrics:

• 88.5% Top-3 search accuracy
• Sub-5-second average response time
• 20–25% reduction in onboarding time for new sales staff
• Reduced customer journey drop-off during product discovery

CONCLUSION

By partnering with Renova Cloud, PNJ has taken a step toward redefining digital jewelry shopping in Vietnam. Powered by Generative AI on AWS, the Intent Search & Visual Search Platform delivers a modern, intuitive, and highly personalized discovery experience that meets the expectations of today’s customers.

This solution not only enhances product search performance across online channels, but also lays a strong foundation for future innovations—including personalized recommendations, advanced style analytics, and fully AI-driven virtual shopping experiences. PNJ is now positioned at the forefront of retail modernization, setting a new standard for the jewelry industry in Southeast Asia.

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