How Smart is Your User Experience?

Artificial Intelligence will take over our lives, our jobs, and render all of humanity useless. Well, maybe. For now, the T-1000 isn't reality yet and AI plays a much more useful role - it makes our lives easier and our user experiences better. For years, content management has focused around creating content, managing versions, taxonomies of keywords, and packaging it all up into pages. We've spent countless hours deriving content architectures and building sophisticated multi-level navigations, only to discover that people still can’t find what they're looking for and end up reverting to search. Maybe it's time to let AI help with this.   

AI in content management plays a role in two major ways: on the editorial side and on the customer experience side.   

Revolutionize the editorial experience

Deep Understanding of Content - I remember CMS projects in which elaborate content taxonomies were created and dedicated taxonomy managers were responsible for tagging content so it could be found again later (and for SEO, of course). And, frankly, outside the media industry, most companies rarely bothered with tagging to begin with. With an AI-integration, the CMS can automatically learn about the content and its intent. It can gauge tone, perform a semantic analysis of text. Images and videos can be scanned for content which in return yields better metadata. And all of that with no effort from the content editors themselves. That way it's breeze to find all images that feature the silver go-go boots with SKU 41238.   

Here's an example of how easy AI-assisted image tagging can be:

Creating Content - If a machine can analyze content to extract metadata, why not go one step further and generate text from keywords. While it sounds like a stretch, there are solutions out in the market that dynamically write content and create entire pages dynamically based on mere keywords. Sports, weather, and stock market news are a perfect example. Features like "write this content for me" will be part of any sophisticated content management solution in the next few years. And, of course, you’ll be able to do it in multiple languages - "Hey CoreMedia, can you please translate this article into Austrian German for me?"   

Suggestions - The real power of AI stems for the ability to sift through large quantities of data. An AI-assistant that understands the content at hand as well as the way the end users interact with the content - what converts and what doesn't - can also quickly point out missing content to the editorial staff and suggest new articles to be written. Or just write the articles itself and automatically test them for their performance.   

Revolutionize the end user experience

Personalization has long been seen as the holy grail of user experiences, but, in reality, often only eCommerce sites do it well - and likely only for product suggestions. Today's content management solutions require editorial users to manage complicated rule sets for mapping content to specific audiences (or segments, personas, or similar). In reality, this is tedious busy work. The content editors are guessing what their audience might like, and, consequently, the adoption of personalization suffers.   

Since AI already has a deep understanding of our content (see above), automatic personalization is the next logical step. Let the AI match the best content to the audience given their user profile and intent/needs, then pick the best performing content (regardless of whether it is images or textual content).   

Dynamic Experiences - Another use case we've been implementing for our clients is building dynamic experiences or pages through AI. Imagine posting picture from the red carpet at the academy awards and the CMS automatically recognizing the people and clothes in the images and assembles pages based on existing content and products on your website. Want to buy that fancy dress Kim Kardashian is wearing in the picture we snapped 5 seconds ago? Here it is.   

Watch a simple example in which uploading a picture of yourself or your favorite celebrity automatically brings up content and products that are related:   

The list of use cases goes on: smart search, analytics, translations, more intelligent customer care portals, and bot-based interactions with your brand.   

Welcome to the future of Content Management.

About CoreMedia

CoreMedia has become a preferred content management vendor in the luxury, fashion and beauty space. We enable the global market leader in luxury online retail, YOOX Net-A-Porter (YNAP), to build outstanding customer experiences. Boots and dm drugstores also chose CoreMedia for their online stores and in-store kiosks. Fashion brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and an iconic Italian footwear company all updated their digital shopping experiences with CoreMedia as well. And this trend didn’t stop at B2C. B2B brands like Graybar and Emerson have adapted the same technology to massively improve their B2B e-commerce experience.

Today, CoreMedia offers out-of-the-box integrations with leading commerce platforms like IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento, plus reference implementations for SAP YaaS and home-grown systems. CoreMedia’s Digital Experience Platform enables brands and retailers to seamlessly add sophisticated content management to their existing store – efficiently and fast.