How QSTA puts vragen.ai to work for food professionals
Food professionals tend to have a lot of questions. About products, uses or recipes. QSTA wants to inspire them and support them as well as it can.
Raymond Wouters Strategist & Designer
3 min read
Growing faster with AI
QSTA director Rian Faaij sees AI as a chance to grow faster without depending on manual input. His goal: a platform that thinks with you, where a question about recipes or trending ingredients leads straight to the right products.
QSTA.AI: their own AI search assistant
QSTA integrated the vragen.ai technology into their own platform and renamed it QSTA.AI. An AI search assistant that helps food professionals with their questions right away. Chefs and restaurant owners can ask about everything on QSTA.nl: recipes, ingredients, background information and thousands of products. It doesn't feel like searching, it feels like talking to someone who understands their world.
Good technology isn't enough, people have to see what it does for them
After an initial configuration we put a vragen.ai page live, integrated into the QSTA menu. The technology worked well, but visibility could be better. Together with QSTA we looked at how to make the new search experience clearer for visitors.
The result: a new design for the header and hero, in which the QSTA promise and the strength of the improved search bar are immediately visible. A simple change that invites people to ask instead of search. At the moment only the hero, including the search bar and example questions, is live on QSTA.nl.
Discovering what people are looking for
vragen.ai runs on the knowledge of QSTA.nl itself, and keeps learning. When visitors keep asking about something that isn't in the knowledge base yet, the team knows immediately where new content is needed. One example: several visitors asked for an iced matcha recipe. It wasn't on the website then. It is now.
"When visitors keep searching for a recipe or product that isn't in our database yet, we see it straight away, and then we know: we need to make content for this."
Every answer is fully traceable
Behind the scenes, vragen.ai records a trace of the steps our RAG AI technology takes, both when searching available sources and when formulating the answer. That gives QSTA full insight into how an answer comes about, and helps them find and remove outdated or incorrect content in time. The trace feature also lets us work out faster which settings need changing.
Innovation is about nerve
QSTA proves that innovation isn't about bigger budgets, it's about nerve. About daring to experiment, collaborate and learn out in the open. Their vragen.ai integration is only the start of something bigger: a future in which users no longer get lost in filters, but find their way easily through natural language.
Looking ahead
QSTA.AI has only just launched, but the ambitions run high. For Wouter it comes down to ease and experience: "Right now it's still a search function you can ask questions of, but I see it getting more and more specific. Within a year I want you to be able to ask questions about the product or recipe you're looking at, anywhere on the site."
vragen.ai on your website within 24 hours?
Want answers generated straight from your own content, and better search results, without involving developers? The vragen.ai page embed script lets you take the same first step QSTA did and experiment with AI without much fuss.