Employee Empowerment​​ ​
Thalia​

The German book retailer Thalia has developed Minerva, an AI-driven recommendation assistant to support its brick-and-mortar retail employees in advising customers on a rapidly growing and diverse product portfolio. ​

The web application, developed entirely in-house, is used on iPad devices and provides data and services via a dialogue-based interface. Technically, Minerva is based on a multi-agent system with specialized expert agents for tasks such as product searches and knowledge graph queries. ​

Minerva has been gradually rolled out since May 2025. The aim is to reduce the workload on employees, ensure the quality of advice, and strengthen omnichannel experiences in the long term.