Petbarn's first ever app has an AI to answer your pet dilemmas

AI is everywhere, but it's sometimes hard to point to an example that is an open and shut case of "genuinely useful for normal people dealing with everyday problems". Petbarn just launched one I'll be pointing to regularly in the months ahead.

The Petbarn pet stores, and associated Greencross vet clinic network, launched their first ever app last week (iOS / Android) and wanted to make it more useful than just a shopping app. So the team worked with Microsoft to develop the PetAI service that puts quick chatbot answers to all your classic questions into the app.

What's great is that the app does not force you to create an account to get access to this useful new feature – and you can test it out on the Petbarn website too. But if you do create an account, you can create pet profiles for your pet shopping and pet AI query needs. This can keep track of your history and help the AI base its answers on your specific pet history.

So why not just search the web for your pet questions? The trick here is that the AI is grounded in the Petbarn and Greencross knowledge base – Australian knowledge about Australian pets and the products you can find in Petbarn stores. It uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a well known method for doing this kind of very specific, carefully grounded style of AI knowledge search.

My pet situation is pretty normal – two cats. But the team at Petbarn says that owners of lizards, fish, or whatever kinds of pets found in Australian homes will get value from using PetAI.

Naturally, you have to ask weird questions to see what this kind of thing is ready for. "Why is my cat such an idiot?" was one question I found that was on the list of questions the app refused to answer. It politely pops a little red box and tells you to refresh the chat to start again.

Questions on cats eating plastic were met with more useful responses, as was my interest in why cats push objects off benches. I also asked about a lizard using a human toilet and received a friendly response that this was very unlikely and that it is important to provide appropriate habitat for lizards at home.

In a world where a lot of people are cramming AI into all sorts of places for little benefit, I really do like seeing PetAI in the Petbarn app. Pet owners have many little quandries and having a trusted little place to ask silly questions seems like a great use of the tech.