What Marketers Want from Generative AI, As Told By a Marketer

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at GROW NYC (alongside our incredible partners at UrbanStems , I should add). It’s a conference for professionals across e-commerce, specifically highlighting the ins and outs of growth marketing.?

Anyone who knows me knows I really am obsessed with marketing. It’s the chance to heavily research and understand a market, position a product, and tell a story. What’s more fun than that? I genuinely love this field, and spending a few days at GROW digging into what’s working, what’s not, what’s exciting, what’s challenging… It was absolutely fantastic.?

One of my biggest takeaways from those few days was one that’s probably not too shocking to any of my fellow marketers: businesses, especially your CEOs, want AI everywhere, in everything, today. This is not an exaggeration! I spoke to someone who had been told by an executive at their company, “tell me what we have for AI stuff.”?

The AI Stuff

What’s happening in AI right now offers a pivotal, once-in-a-lifetime moment for marketers. Having seen what our teams here at Bloomreach are working on, I really can say with confidence that your current understanding of customer engagement is about to be turned upside down. In a very good way. The implications for e-commerce marketers are HUGE.

As our CEO and co-founder Raj recently wrote about in Total Retail, generative AI and LLMs are putting conversation back at the center of commerce. That’s going to open up a world of possibilities for marketing.?

After all, relationships are at the heart of all we do. Every metric we’re trying to influence is ultimately impacted by the strength of the relationships we build with our customers. And conversation can be so powerful in helping us build them (or destroy them). Imagine if, instead of guessing what your customers wanted to see, they could just tell you. If your campaigns became less about marketing to customers and more about engaging with them. It’s a future I know every single marketer is excited about. It’s a future that we’re actively working toward at Bloomreach.?

The Bloomreach Engagement Roadmap

We’re no strangers to AI here. It’s been a foundational part of our products since the beginning. In Bloomreach Engagement, AI is usually what our customers love most about the platform, even when they don't realize it. The granularity of our segmentation, the predictive capabilities of our campaign automation, features like optimal send time or churn prediction — these are all powered by AI, and have been available to and loved by our customers for quite some time now. That’s what gives us so much confidence in the features we’ll soon be able to launch, built on the advancements in generative AI and LLMs.?

Like I said, our teams are working on some truly incredible things. Some of those things you’ll need to join our upcoming Edge Summit to hear about. Others you can read about in this recent LinkedIn article from Raj, where he detailed the near-term product roadmap for our Bloomreach Discovery customers.

Today, I get to share a taste of what’s to come for our Engagement product. And as a marketer, I feel qualified to say that these features are really, really exciting. Marketers can soon expect generative AI and LLM-based features in our Engagement product that:

Offer greater empowerment and time-to-value by:?

• Automatically generating custom reports and metrics through a conversational interface (simply ask Engagement to do things like, “generate a report showing email CTR for my last three campaigns”)
• Allowing you to ask the Engagement platform to create funnel reports or segmentations through a conversational interface
• Instantly notifying you of important changes in key metrics, as set by you, allowing you to keep on top of campaign success even when you’re away — like “hey, your revenue is down, here’s why, let’s fix it!”

Drive omnichannel excellence by:

• Enabling conversational customer support through SMS via an expanded integration with one of our existing partners
• Enhancing the precision of web targeting by allowing you to better define where to show personalized weblayers and optimization variants (both enhancing the shopper experience and driving down CAC with more precise targeting)

Enhance real-time personalization and intelligence by:

• Offering more ways for you to use contextual personalization, an advanced AI/ML feature for true 1:1 personalization (Instead of asking ‘which email or banner variant is best for majority of our customers’, contextual personalization gets you the answer to ‘which variant is best for each individual customer?’)
• Automatically reviewing click events and filtering out the ones caused by bots, getting you more reliable customer insights?

Those last two features are actually already launched and ready for customers to use. The others we’re eager to share more information about in the coming weeks and months. But rest assured, there’s plenty of “AI stuff” available today… and even more incredible “AI stuff” coming tomorrow.?

Join the Conversation

On August 24-25, we’re hosting the Edge Summit, a livestream and in-person event fully dedicated to exploring the impact of generative AI and LLMs on e-commerce. In addition to featuring conversations with leaders from across retail and technology, we’ll also be announcing some big news from Bloomreach — including announcements that I know our Engagement customers will be very interested in.?

So I hope that, whether you’re a marketer or a merchandiser, a Bloomreach customer or just someone in my network that was kind enough to read to the end of this article, you’ll join the conversation at the Edge Summit. With this new world of AI, there are limitless possibilities about to be unlocked for marketers and for the whole of e-commerce. We’re really excited to explore those possibilities together.?

Sign up for the event today.?