Explore 3 ways AI boosts eCommerce productivity, 2 traps to avoid, plus news on AI tools, drone delivery noise, and East Coast supply chain challenges.
Artificial Intelligence took the internet by storm last year. Since then, iterative improvement has been more revolutionary than evolutionary. From better personalization to content development, almost every tech company leverages AI in one way or another.
In Episode #14 of the eCom Buzz, we will dissect ways to use AI to build better content. Keep reading for some entertaining anecdotes. This AI journey has had its share of hilarious bumps.
PS: Follow me on LinkedIn to learn about a new release arriving next Tuesday, October 8.
Drone delivery has a practical limitation: noise.
Modern technology is amazing, but it’s still not entirely practical. Amazon is running into some technical limitations with its drone: noise. Hearing a never-ending whooshing sound would be annoying and borderline disturbing.
East Coast shipyard strikes will affect the supply chain.
This is perfect timing for the holiday season (sarcasm). Be prepared for challenges in getting access to your products. Hopefully, this will be short-lived.
Do you remember the Pokemon Go craze in 2016? It was ubiquitous. You could spot the players by how they didn’t use sidewalks and held their phones out in front of them. Yep, there’s even an entertaining Reddit thread about it.
As of mid-2023, the AI-craze has hit the tech industry. You can spot the players by walking through a tradeshow. Simply look at their signage and every single one will have “AI” in their marketing slogans. It is hard to find tech players that don’t have AI in their marketing.
We will review some ways that AI can benefit you. Win #3 on the list is the most valuable to me.
Yes, we still need stock photos from time to time. Instead of combing through websites like Pexels or Adobe Stock, we can simply put a prompt into the AI engine. It may be as simple as depicting our logo on a lifestyle picture or removing some details from an existing photo. Perhaps we sell frames and need to create pictures to represent within the frame.
Or, we simply need hero images for website content.
ChatGPT’s DALL-E3 image generator is the best for creating new images, while Adobe’s Firefly is the best for modifying and adjusting images.
ChatGPT has many artistic styles to influence its output. You can find a non-exhaustive list here.
Here are some additional suggestions:
Product descriptions, articles, and emails all have something in common. They need a shortened edition, a headline/subject/meta description.
With ChatGPT, all you have to do is use a prompt like this:
give me three SEO-optimized meta descriptions for this page: https://www.jthomashome.com/products/walnut-floating-shelves
Take the best of the three and run with it.
You’re writing an article about a subject you are familiar with, perhaps like the back of your hand. You get feedback that you missed a few critical points only after release. I’ve been there and done that. It’s not the end of the world, but wouldn’t it be nice to catch this earlier?
You bet.
Write a question like this:
Give me bullet points of what are some considerations that restaurants use to determine what type of glasses to serve their patrons.
I find that roughly half of the suggestions align with what I’m thinking; a quarter are irrelevant or duplicates of each other, and the remainder are angles that I didn’t think of.
As a side note, Claude AI is better than ChatGPT for writing. Its output is far more natural. I still use ChatGPT because it has more features (like image generation).
Google’s AI search feature spectacularly showed us this reality. I got a tremendous laugh from this compilation. While this is an extreme example, I believe it represents the general idea that AI is an assistant, not a human replacement.
For this and the lack of a “human” feel, I do not use AI (even Claude) to write published text for me. It’s too risky.
I rely on it to assist my creation process: ensure all points are covered and correct my writing (with Grammarly).
ChatGPT Terms of Use
Our use of content. We may use Content [both the chat input and responses] to provide, maintain, develop, and improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and policies, and keep our Services safe.
While you can opt out of this, everything you enter into ChatGPT should be considered public. Samsung learned this the hard way when one of their employees used it to analyze source code. Other studies show that this training data can be regurgitated.
Just like we are trained to think twice before clicking a link in an email, we need to think twice before using ChatGPT indiscriminately.
