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Few technologies have excited as much hype (or promised as must change) as artificial intelligence (AI). However, many brands are still determining exactly what the role of AI in ecommerce is — or should be.
There are several potential answers to that question, and many brands and retailers have already found uses for certain types of AI, such as predictive analytics. But most are still exploring the role of generative AI, which only became accessible relatively recently.
Steve Engelbrecht, founder and CEO of ecommerce consulting firm Sitation, believes its potential role is a significant one.
He recently joined the “Unpacking the Digital Shelf” podcast to explore how AI might impact brands going forward on the episode “AI Can Change the Scale and Impact of Your Digital Shelf Program Right Now.”
Engelbrecht explains how his company is helping brands incorporate generative AI into their product content-creation process and shares strategies for using AI to enhance workflows and boost revenue.
“This is a revolution as big as the internet itself or the smartphone, in my opinion. And this is going to change a lot about our economy and how we're working and interacting with each other and with our computing systems.”— Steve Engelbrecht, Founder and CEO, Sitation
Generative AI, according to Engelbrecht, “is a revolution as big as the internet itself or the smartphone, in my opinion. And this is going to change a lot about our economy and how we're working and interacting with each other and with our computing systems.”
Engelbrecht has seen the beginnings of this revolution in his own work at Sitation, where he and his team provide a tool for drafting product descriptions with generative AI. In this use case, according to Engelbrecht, the role of AI in ecommerce is to create content at scale.
Creating product content, he explains, “is a very time-consuming piece of effort and work for any company that's dealing with a lot of product data, but especially when you've got a huge catalog that's complicated by multiple languages, multiple channels, multiple audiences.”
“What if we can generate thousands of product descriptions overnight? What if we can take feedback from the field and integrate that into the models and make them smarter and better so … they do a better job of compelling people to add to their cart and complete a purchase? For us, that's the promise of this technology and what we're most excited about,” Engelbrecht says.
Engelbrecht assures that, while generative AI can do some copywriting today, the goal isn’t to replace human copywriters altogether.
Instead, copywriting experts will take on new, more strategic roles. Engelbrecht compares this transition to “previous technological revolutions that were always growth events.”
“These were not things that caused massive unemployment,” he says. “The invention of the computer — people were scared of it because it's like, what's going to happen to accountants? And then look what it has caused: this massive revolution of computing becoming part of everyday life, part of everyday work.”
He foresees generative AI having a similar impact, causing digital leaders to incorporate the technology — but not replace their experienced workforce. After all, brands will need human copywriters to review AI outputs and guarantee that they’re clear, accurate, and engaging.
“No one in their right mind would automate this and never read it and just trust that whatever output [an AI produces is accurate],” Engelbrecht says. “You would never do that with human copywriters, and it doesn't make sense that we would consider doing that with an AI-based system, either.”
The risk of “hallucinations,” or inaccurate text produced by an AI, is still a real problem, however. In any AI-based workflow, Engelbrecht says, “there is a human in the loop element, at the very least for spot checking, but ideally for reviewing the output for consistency and correctness before we're publishing that information into anything that would be visible to customers.”
By keeping a human in the loop, brands can publish large quantities of content at scale while guaranteeing that the content is high quality.
“[It’s] really exciting to think about how we can tune these over time, and we can make that output better and better … and be able to scale that potentially infinitely.”— Steve Engelbrecht, Founder and CEO, Sitation
The role of AI in ecommerce will only grow over time. After all, the more a brand uses generative AI, the better it can fine-tune the AI’s outputs. It’s “really exciting to think about how we can tune these over time, and we can make that output better and better … and be able to scale that potentially infinitely,” Engelbrecht says.
To prepare for the permeation of AI throughout ecommerce, Engelbrecht encourages brand professionals to try it out for themselves by experimenting with the free version of ChatGPT.
“If you're a businessperson [who] deals with information, try it, play with it, experience it,” he says. Becoming familiar with the strengths and limitations of generative AI can help you understand how best to use it.
Gathering data is the other key thing to focus on right now, Engelbrecht says.
“If you're dealing with lots and lots of product data, what I would love to ask you to do is to do some benchmarking to try to get a sense of exactly how complex your copywriting process truly is,” Engelbrecht says.
With that knowledge, you’ll be able to determine if generative AI has a place in your digital shelf’s future — and what that place might be.
Industry innovators are still exploring the role of AI in ecommerce. As the technology evolves, brands are increasingly incorporating accepted solutions like predictive analytics and newer tools like generative AI into their ecommerce tech stacks to enhance how they create content.
To learn more about how generative AI works, what risks it entails, and whether it can be beneficial to your brand, listen to the full episode.
