When Products Can Answer Questions

These two completely separate activities are set to fundamentally change how we discover and select products.

In the Digital Product Passport (DPP), a significant portion of the conversation centres on compliance. Which makes sense, after all, it is ultimately a regulatory play with an aggressive timeline, and ensuring product data is accurate and maintainable has always been challenging.

However, beneath this focus on compliance lies a genuine opportunity to use the DPP for other areas, such as sales and customer support.

DPP requires products to carry a structured, machine-readable record of their composition, origins of materials, and end-of-life processes. This data should not serve as mere labels for consumers to skim; it should be queryable and comparable at scale by software.

Meanwhile, the way people search and discover products is also evolving. Instead of navigating filters and category pages, users are increasingly asking questions and expecting useful answers.

Currently, AI-driven answers are based on whatever data is available, such as marketing copy, partial specifications, or even reviews. This approach can be confident but unreliable on critical points such as recyclability, repairability, or compatibility with existing products.

And as the way we ask questions evolves, the underlying data behind those answers remains patchy. DPPs are starting to address this by creating a verified data layer at the product level.

With structured passport data, you instantly have more product information available for consumption and can create a generative interface on top of that. This results in something we cannot always achieve, answers you can trust, grounded in the product itself rather than retailer descriptions.

These questions can be sustainability-related or purely practical, it doesn’t matter. The same underlying data supports both.

Today, answering these questions often involves jumping between tabs and piecing together specifications. With structured passport data, that work collapses into a single interaction.

Deeper down, this shift also makes products more useful and intelligent. If products can answer questions, they can also surface what people are asking. This turns every interaction into a valuable signal that provides feedback you don’t get from surveys or scheduled research. People are asking what they actually want to know, in their own words, as they make decisions.

Over time, this will build a continuous feedback loop. You see where customers get stuck, what they do not understand, what they are trying to achieve, and what they wish existed. Patterns may emerge, such as a spike in compatibility questions pointing to missing accessories or repeated material questions highlighting gaps in product clarity or even unexpected uses and needs showing up in how people phrase their queries.

The opportunity is that this becomes a direct input into the product, not just marketing. You can start to see what to fix, what to explain better, and what to build next.

Commercially, DPP data acts as more than just a regulatory requirement; it becomes part of how products are discovered and evaluated. The richer and more usable the data is, the more likely your product will surface when customers search through conversations.

You might argue that collecting and maintaining product data is similar to SEO, but harder to manipulate. Data is structured, verified, and tied to the physical product rather than marketing copy that a brand controls.

You won’t rank in generative search results because you have written better copy, but because the underlying data actually answers the question. The work shifts from optimising language to improving the product itself.

By not treating DPP purely as compliance but part of the product and customer experience, it becomes something else entirely, a way for the product to speak for itself. That’s the problem we’ve been working on, from the interface side.

TalkPod connects to product data and lets customers ask questions in natural language. Extending that to structured passport data is a straightforward next step, and one we are already exploring.

The pieces are already in motion, with regulation landing and conversational interfaces becoming more widely used. What hasn’t happened yet is the deliberate connection between the two.

That’s where we see a huge opportunity, and one that TalkPod answers. After all, why let customers search through multiple tabs when they can just ask a question? And why miss out on valuable feedback when every interaction can be turned into actionable insight?