Investigating New and Emerging Technologies Like Conversational Commerce and ChatGPT

Welcome to the sixth installment of our mini-series on merchandisers' use of AI-first technology to close the gap between consumers and merchants! Our previous article discussed how? AI-first product discovery tech helps free up valuable time for merchandisers to strategize how to push overstock and slow-moving inventory. In this issue, we're looking at another way merchandisers can spend that time: investigating new and emerging technologies.

As discussed in earlier parts of this series, AI-first product discovery, specifically, gives merchandisers back valuable time that would have otherwise been spent manually optimizing thousands of search rules. With that time back, they now have the freedom to focus on more strategic and revenue-generating initiatives. This includes proactively investigating new and emerging technology solutions, to determine if, when and how their companies can benefit from them.?

Retailers that have already started leveraging AI are leading the eCommerce market, proving that AI will be key in driving innovation for years to come. So, let’s look at two key technologies merchandisers can investigate that will add significant value for their companies: Conversational Commerce and Generative AI (genAI).

Conversational Commerce Conversational commerce is where eCommerce and technology intersect, allowing brands to connect with their customers in new ways across platforms 24/7. While it has been around for several years, genAI is reshaping and advancing it. Conversational commerce started with messaging apps and SMS systems before expanding to chatbots, virtual assistants, and other forms of automated conversation.?

Most recently, retailers have integrated conversational commerce into their search functionality due to next-gen AI’s ability to understand customers’ intent, even amongst ambiguous or conversational search queries, and provide relevant, personalized search results and product recommendations. With more time to research and strategize, merchandisers can proactively evaluate conversational commerce applications and strategize how they might integrate the technology into their tech stack and website. It’s also worth considering that different points along the customer journey may require different applications of conversational commerce to provide the best customer experience. Merchandisers are best suited for evaluating and adjusting the performance of conversational commerce across the customer shopping journey.

ChatGPT and Generative AI While conversational commerce is one application of genAI, there are many others that retailers can benefit from. ChatGPT is perhaps the most recognizable genAI model to emerge from 2023, though it’s certainly not the only such platform on the market. Instead, it represents a class of AI solutions designed to generate content, from text to images to audio and more. The applications for this technology are widespread and can be deeply impactful for retailers.??

With more time to explore genAI applications, merchandisers can find additional ways to leverage genAI solutions to automate key behind-the-scenes tasks. For example, they might explore how generative AI can help with writing product descriptions or swiftly generating segmented landing page variants for merchandising campaigns. The large language models (LLMs) that generative AI are built on are also perfectly suited to enhance product data quality, filling in missing product attributes to fix data quality problems that degrade the product discovery experience. Any one of these applications could drive significant productivity gains for merchandisers – on top of the gains realized with AI-first search and product discovery! – while also driving sales and revenue.?

In the current eCommerce landscape, AI is essential to success, and merchandising teams are some of the best-positioned personnel to evaluate these new technologies as they hit the market. Not every AI application will be suitable for each company, which is why it is essential that merchandisers be able to get out from under the burden of manual search rule curation and have the time necessary to investigate these new technologies. By going from reactive to proactive, merchandisers can become strategic business partners, helping to guide the course of the company and enhance the retail experience further.?

Check back for our next post for more details on how AI is changing the role of the merchandiser!