Hygie31 Digital has just expanded internationally. How was AI decisive in this move?
Since April 2026, 20 years after its launch, our Cocooncenter website is active in 19 countries. Today, 40% of our turnover comes from international markets. Whereas it took 17 years to launch in 7 countries – France, UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Poland -, thanks to artificial intelligence, we made inroads in 12 markets in 3 months. AI allowed us to accelerate at lower cost by automating customer service, site translation, etc. In early 2027, we will add 8 more countries. Cocooncenter will cover the 27 European Union countries. Another figure: in 2017, when we launched Cocooncenter in Germany, it cost us €200,000 to translate product sheets and all site pages. Today, opening these 12 markets cost less than €2,000, even though our website has 35,000 product sheets.
Previously, one of the blocking points regarding foreign expansion was customer service. Since the beginning of 2025, we have set up automatic email translation and summarisation, allowing our agents to reply quickly. Furthermore, human agents are no longer needed to answer questions like “Where is my order?”, as AI handles it. We are moving to step 2, aiming to better analyze email content with AI to further automate responses. It also allows our internal staff to grow in their professional responsibility, which is very interesting.
What share of online turnover comes from AI engines like ChatGPT and Gemini?
For Cocooncenter.com, LLMs represented 0.9% of e-commerce sales in August 2026, which is 4 times more than last year. Most consumers’ traffic comes from ChatGPT, the pioneer from OpenAI. The recent launch of Google AI Overview in France will mechanically and significantly enhance this share of turnover coming from LLM searches. Soon, we will no longer be able to answer this question.