New AI-Powered Chatbot Is Specifically Designed for Jewelers

By Rob Bates | August 14, 2026

It’s a salesperson with “unlimited product knowledge” that’s available “24 hours a day.” It can offer customers special deals and discount codes, and speak to them not only in English, but in almost any language they speak. It even cracks jokes.

That’s how Jacques Voorhees, the founder of online trading platform Polygon, describes Sherpa, the AI-powered chatbot that his new company, Icecap AI, is making available to retail jewelers. Voorhees debuted the technology to the trade last month at the World Diamond Congress in Singapore. It can be downloaded for free on the Icecap website.

Already being used by about a dozen stores, Sherpa is meant to sit on a jeweler’s site and answer any jewelry-related queries—such as “What do the Four Cs mean?”—using content provided by trade associations and different brands.

But Voorhees says what distinguishes Sherpa from most chatbots (which he admits are “mostly glorified FAQs”) is that it’s “AI-powered” and allows retailers to customize it to their specifications.

“The jewelers have complete control of it,” he says. “It doesn’t get its information from the Internet. We think that’s important.”

First, he says, it scrapes information from the jeweler’s website. After that, the retailers “can feed whatever third-party content they want into it. There’s a whole portal behind it that lets them train it.

“It’s very much an AI version of an employee. You can train it just like you would train a salesperson. You can tell it: Don’t call them ‘lab-grown diamonds.’ Call them ‘synthetic.’ Or vice versa.”

He says the chatbot was designed with a “sales orientation. It is trained to be a salesperson first. It will answer other questions, but it still wants to sell you something.”

He adds that “we also programmed it to have a sense of humor. Unless jewelers don’t want that, and then they can get rid of it.”

Though Sherpa is being given away for free, Voorhees says Icecap AI—which he founded with JCK show veteran and Polygon marketing VP Krista Olson, who serves as its chief operating officer—plans to make money in two ways. First, the chatbot is a “freemium” product, meaning that if retailers pay extra, they will get a version with expanded features. And second, he hopes to charge brands to let the chatbot relay their sales info, in what he believes is the hot marketing trend of the future.

“I believe that the world of website navigation is about to become obsolete,” he says. “In the future, people won’t scroll through different pages to look things up on your website. They will go to the chatbot and ask the question.

“So what that chatbot tells you, what product knowledge it has, is huge,” he says. “It will be like the wars for shelf space. If you tell it, ‘I’m going to buy an expensive watch for my dad,’ it will give you an answer. And if you’re an upstream brand, you will want to be part of that conversation, and you will want to control it. You want it to know all about your products.

“It’s an entirely new form of marketing,” he says, “not just for the jewelry industry, but for the world, really.”

Top: Sherpa in action (photos courtesy of Icecap AI)