How Thrive Market is scaling healthy living with AI.

Thrive Market was founded with a big idea: that healthy, sustainable living shouldn’t be a luxury. Today, the mission-driven, membership-based online retailer serves millions of families with ethically sourced, organic, and non-GMO products, shipped carbon-neutrally.

But delivering on that promise at scale is no small feat. As Thrive Market expanded, so did the volume and complexity of member interactions, from service inquiries to retention challenges. “Our mission is to make healthy and sustainable living easy and affordable,” says Sasha Siddhartha, Thrive Market’s CTO and Co-Founder. “And the member experience has to deliver on that. It needs to be personalized, immediate, and reliable.”

Since its founding, Thrive Market relied on a support team to handle member inquiries. In recent years, the team introduced basic automation tools to help scale, but these systems were still rigid, template-based, and required constant manual upkeep. "They weren’t truly conversational,” Sasha explains. “But even those early tools helped us realize the power of giving members what they really want: fast, clear answers without the wait.”

From automation to intelligence

When Thrive Market began its search for a more advanced solution, the team had high standards. “We’re a company that values test-and-learn,” Sasha notes. “We needed a partner who could help us prove value fast, through real experiments and measurable outcomes.”

Thrive Market chose Sierra to power its AI-driven member support. Built on Sierra’s platform, the AI agent now handles a wide range of member interactions.

The early results showed a clear impact. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, Thrive Market saw over a 50% improvement in case resolution, enabling more member questions to be resolved instantly—without human involvement. Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) for AI-handled interactions reached nearly 90%, reflecting strong member approval.

Smart testing meets better member care

Thrive Market stands out not only for its mission, but for how deeply it applies data and experimentation to every decision, including its use of AI.

“We’ve always been a company that values learning velocity,” Sasha explains. “The ability to run A/B tests with the agent, and to test new messaging strategies or offers in real time, is something that’s been really hard to do with traditional service tools. With Sierra, it’s now part of our regular workflow.”

The Thrive Market team is constantly refining the agent’s logic, tone, and flows based on real member feedback and performance data. That ability to learn and adapt has turned the agent into a high-performing extension of Thrive Market’s brand, not just a support tool.

And the branding is no accident. Thrive Market's original support persona was known as Kelly, designed to reflect a knowledgeable, compassionate guide in the health and wellness space. As the company transitioned to AI, the team introduced Olive, a new expression of that same ethos. “Our members are trusting us with really personal information, about their health goals, their diets, their families,” Sasha says. “They want to feel understood. The AI agent needs to be fast and efficient, yes, but also warm and smart.”

Scaling personalization across the member journey

While the current agent primarily lives in chat, Sasha sees a much bigger future. “The goal is to make Sierra the first point of entry for nearly every member interaction,” he says. That includes expanding to voice, email, SMS, and even proactive outreach during operational hiccups. But the most exciting horizon is where AI goes beyond support entirely.

“We’ve always had this vision of a guided grocery experience,” Sasha shares. “Think of it like a personal shopper for your health goals, someone who can recommend products, answer questions, help you onboard, and evolve with you over time.”

The Thrive Market team is already exploring conversational AI in other parts of the customer experience, from product discovery to onboarding. “Once you get there,” Sasha says, “you unlock a whole new world filled with more data, more context, and more ways to personalize how we show up for our members.”

A CTO’s advice

For Sasha, who leads Thrive Market’s entire technology stack—from engineering to product to IT—the key to success with AI isn’t hype. It’s diligence.

“There’s a lot of noise out there,” he says. “A year ago, it wasn’t obvious which vendors were real, which use cases were production-ready. So we treated this like any other software investment. We had specific problems to solve, metrics to hit, and expectations to manage.”

That grounding has served Thrive Market well. With Sierra, the team found a partner who could match that rigor, and move fast.

“AI isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it thing,” Sasha says. “It needs to be trained, observed, and optimized. But when you do it right, it’s a powerful way to drive impact. And we’re just getting started.”