Michelle Bacharach had a problem. She would buy an article of clothing and then realize it didn’t go with anything else in her closet. Then she found a way for artificial intelligence to do in seconds what her human brain could not.

The co-founder and chief executive officer of FINDMINE Inc. believes the company’s retail consulting app can help both shoppers and sellers. According to Bacharach’s research, “Customers will buy 170 percent more if you show them how to use the product that they are buying.”

In an interview at South by Southwest with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, she explained how she teamed up with a techie friend to create the app. (*Disclosure below.)

They began exploring AI and machine learning technologies to find out if they could “make a machine replicate what a human does, which is figuring out what’s stylish?” she said.

Retail data mother lode

Luckily, for Bacharach, retail data is easily accessible, unlike more protected data types, such as healthcare.

“We didn’t even have to have a customer live before we started doing cool stuff with machine learning with large data sets,” she said.

FINDMINE is available to business-like fashion retailers and brands who then decide how to offer it to customers to use. This might be via the eCommerce page, in store or even in the sales associate’s phone.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the South by Southwest (SXSW). (*Disclosure: Intel sponsors some SXSW segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE