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Earlier this month, supplement category leader Thorne quietly launched a generative AI-powered wellness advisor chatbot named Taia.
Found on Thorne’s homepage, shoppers are prompted to engage with Taia to ask health and wellness questions, including queries about products and general wellness advice on topics including sleep, stress, energy, digestion and immunity.
“Trying to maintain wellness can be really complicated,” said Nathan Price, PhD., Thorne’s chief science officer, author and co-director of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. “We all have these moments where you feel like, ‘How do I just get myself back to health?’ And so what we wanted to do with the development of Taia — and what I think a lot of the AI systems that are being developed now [strive to do] — is to provide as much [health and wellness] clarity or guidance as we can as people are trying to sort out a solution in their life.”
For example, Dr. Price noted gut issues, itchy skin and exhaustion as common wellness complaints. Taia can provide insights into these concerns, personalized supplement recommendations, lifestyle and nutrition tips, and information on the brand’s products and policies. Taia is trained on Thorne’s internal knowledge database, powered by a team of researchers and doctors, and AI foundational knowledge of health and wellness. It also sifts through Thorne’s library of blog posts and studies to recommend additional reading and delivers general advice.
Thorne launched in 1984 and currently has more than 300 products sold DTC and across top retailers. Thorne was acquired by L Catterton equity group in 2023 for approximately $680 million. Thorne was publicly traded until its acquisition. In 2022, the last full year it reported earnings, its sales were up 24% to reach $228 million in sales.
Unlike many companies, Thorne’s business is evenly spread across categories; there is no hero product driving its business, making personalization crucial for conversion, said Dr. Price. “We really want people to be able to find what’s going to make a difference for them, and that was my primary motivation [to make Taia],” he said.
Taia has been in the works for four years and was built by an in-house team of engineers using large language AI models. If logged into one’s Thorne account, a user’s conversations are saved to allow Taia to recall previous queries and recommendations, allowing Taia to become more useful to the user over time.
Dr. Price told Glossy that consumers are responding well. The biggest complaint is confusion over Taia’s offering: Users think it’s customer service, for example, but are disappointed to learn Taia cannot track one’s online order or help them find a nearby retailer.
Similar to OpenAI’s beta launch of ChatGPT Health earlier this month, Taia cannot diagnose or treat illness, an important difference from telehealth services like Forward Health or Next Health. This distinction prevents these new AI-powered offerings from being regulated as a health device by the FDA. Regulatory compliance is far from easy, Dr. Price told Glossy. “[Regulatory compliance] is a huge challenge, and one of the major things we had to do [while building Taia] because it’s not allowed to give medical advice,” he said.
Taia’s competition includes health tracker wellness advisors such as Oura Ring’s Oura Advisor, Headspace’s Ebb and ChatGPT Health, among others.
The launch of Taia coincides with the release of a new Thorne study of 3,000 consumers earlier this month. The study, conducted by Censuswide in October of last year, found that 57% of participants are unsure which health products are best for them, while 67% said they would use a trusted tool to simplify supplement decisions and personalize recommendations.
What’s more, around half of the participants said there is too much conflicting information about supplements online, while one in three people said it’s too hard to decipher what their health data means.
Dr. Price is also the co-author of the 2023 book “The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands.” Longevity expert Dr. Mark Hyman described it like this: “If you want to understand how the latest advances in genomics and AI can completely transform your health, and to translate this promise into practical tools that you can apply today, read this book!”
Dr. Price believes that the avalanche of data and generative AI today can and will make health outcomes more predictable. He describes the ongoing health technological movement as “leading to a new era of freedom in health.”
His vision for the future includes an era when various chatbots are directly linked and can share information back and forth, provide visibility to one’s physician, and accurately predict (and help prevent) nearly every ailment imaginable. He is currently exploring pathways to connect Taia to other AI chatbots to ensure ongoing relevancy of the brand.
“The race is on to try to build out systems that give us early [health] warning signs, visibility [into our health data] and actions to take to kind of steer yourself [through] the uncertainty of the human experience,” he said.
However, this new future isn’t for everyone — and that’s OK, he said. That is, those who value privacy over visibility are likely to opt out, for now.
“As a biohacker and optimist, I want all [my health] data aggregated. I want as much of it as possible, and I want the best recommendations, and that’s what a lot of people want,” said Dr. Price. “But there are also segments of people that want everything in isolation. … They don’t want any one group to know too much about [them], and both of those perspectives are valid and need to be respected.”
But will there be room for a potential influx of wellness advisor chatbots? Or will one slowly gain all the market share while the rest slowly disappear? “There are different ways that this could go,” Dr. Price said. “Ultimately, the decisions on those fronts will be made by consumers: What do they like? What do they trust? What do they find to be the most helpful in their lives?”
Dr. Price told Glossy that AI-powered technology is moving so fast, today’s offerings will seem archaic in the next two years.
“For companies like ours, [there is an] impetus both for having AI as part of our offering and experience, [but] there are also going to be ways that we want to push out information that we are privy to, what we know, and so forth, into other [AI] ecosystems,” he said. “We definitely want to be nimble from the standpoint of where the world is going.”
