The eTail West conference in Palm Springs, California, celebrated the brand’s 25 years of hosting live events with perspectives on core trends in online retail. True to industry priorities in 2024, lots of the discussions focused on emerging technologies. One pervasive thread was artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly the subject of how retailers are using AI.
“One of my favorite things to say is ‘Technology for technology’s sake: Probably not the perfect idea,’” said Rose Hamilton, a founder and principal advisor on the firm Compass Rose Ventures, during one in all eTail West’s Feb. 28 morning sessions.
Rose Hamilton, founder and principal advisor at Compass Rose Ventures, speaking at eTail West | Photo credit: eTail West
Hamilton acknowledged the brand new opportunities being opened up through the use of AI, machine learning and data together to enhance capabilities. Nonetheless, she encouraged retailers present to not lose focus.
“What I don’t imagine is actually going to alter in one other 10 years is the importance of intimacy of knowing your customer,” she stated.
At Hamilton’s panel and others throughout the show, retail leaders swapped stories and best practices from their recent experiences. These insights covered early approaches and tips on how to test AI tools before deciding to deploy them widely. Nonetheless, in addition they included accounts of how AI is already getting used and what they’ve learned. Those discussions eventually led to opinions on standards and guardrails that some retailers have set as much as avoid missteps.
Editor’s note: This is a component one in a two-part have a look at the AI perspectives presented at eTail West. Look ahead to the second part on March 5.
The right way to treat testing before adopting AI tools
One eTail panel on Wednesday focused explicitly on current AI experiences in retail. There, tips on how to treat the pre-adoption phase as a corporation became a significant query.
“You bring an open mind and a testing mentality,” said Suruchi Shukla, vp of selling on the designed products marketplace Minted. Shukla called this mindset “key” to getting began.
She also acknowledged initial barriers.
“Our biggest factor that is available in is inertia,” she recalled. “How will we even start?”
As an answer, her team looked for tactics to get past indecision to put down a basis for informed decisions afterward.
“Six months ago, my team was struggling,” Shukla said. “So we found a boot camp and I attended.”
They spread the boot camps out over a couple of days. Members of her marketing group attended. They gained exposure “to many tools,” she said, which they then brought back to Minted. As for the strategy of integrating those tools into projects and workflows, Shukla highlighted this testing phase before clear results were expected as crucial to improving outcomes afterward.
“I feel it’s also giving your organization the permission to go experiment without having that expectation of performance immediately,” she assessed. “So people began to play with it and organically that adoption began. So I feel it’s more about using AI as a place to begin and never immediately putting any expectations and rules around it.”
Minted is No. 407 within the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s rating of North America’s online retailers by web sales. Digital Commerce 360 categorizes Minted as a Flowers & Gifts retailer in its Top 1000 database.
How retailers are using AI tools now
As Hamilton mentioned earlier within the day, AI and lots of of its associated use cases for online retail will not be necessarily latest. For instance, Rachel Frederick, a vp and general manager, ecommerce, at Sur La Table, noted that her company has been using AI tools a minimum of way back to 2017.
Sur La Table is No. 408 within the Top 1000. Digital Commerce 360 categorizes Sur La Table as a Housewares & Home Furnishings retailer in its Top 1000 database.
Frederick mentioned Bloomreach for smart site search and Contentsquare for behavioral analytics as two pieces of Sur La Table’s technology stack. She said these tools have been essential for informing “product recommendations” and “customer behavioral analytics, having the ability to discover friction and understanding what the impact is or the chance” to prioritize.
Within the meantime, she said Sur La Table is “testing and learning lots” with use cases in email and specifically generative AI for “tools that help deflect WisMO [“Where is my order?”] calls for customer support.”
“That’s something that we’ve done,” Frederick said. “Voice response systems in AI, in addition to taking a look at things like creating enviro-lifestyle assets.”
The assets she referred to can involve real product photos layered with generative AI-executed changes to supply latest contexts for various scenarios. She used cookware as an instance an final result:
Frederick’s team may start a request “through the use of product images and having the ability to give a prompt to say, yes, here’s a Dutch oven product image, but now I need you to create one other image that has it on a stovetop with stew,” she described. “Now, give me one other image that has that very same Dutch oven — different color, sitting on a cutting board with a loaf of bread. It’s just showing the variety of a product, and it can be quite seasonally relevant.”
“Through that gen AI, we’re actually capable of create more assets in a short time and efficiently,” Frederick explained.
Generative AI use for product images
At Minted, Shukla detailed one other visual use case, where she said the corporate worked with the seller Cloudinary to provide customized art images on Minted’s product detail page (PDP).
“They built a singular service for us where we will do the bottom image shooting, but they then help us generate images in situ,” Shukla said. “So for an art product or a painting, people actually need to see it, and the sizes are essential.”
The generative AI can assist display the artwork against various kinds of backdrops with latest surroundings.
“Where it’s placed on the sofa and stuff is very important, but we don’t have the bandwidth or the resources to shoot so many setups and in order that service has been implausible for us to make use of this gen AI utilized in a really different way.”
Shukla also cited Adobe’s Firefly software, which Minted used, began through the 2023 holiday season to cut back time spent by its customer support team on certain problems.
“At Minted, whenever you’re constructing your holiday cards, people upload their images,” Shukla said. “And previously, they used to achieve out to our customer support team, asking them their help for retouching — , they need to remove a automobile from the background, something like that.”
She credited Firefly for its role in quickly accomplishing tasks including background expansion, filling and retouching.
“That really really helped our design services team,” she stated. “Their bandwidth really opened up.”
Guardrails for AI and associated risks
Retailers at eTail were often enthusiastic and complimentary of AI’s capabilities. Still, in addition they outlined where limits and risks for AI tools can necessitate guardrails. The risks, as Shukla shared, may be external, in addition to internal for organizations.
“It’s the brand fame risk that’s top of mind,” Shukla said. “We’ve all sort of heard about AI inaccuracies, AI biases, and if people remember when a couple of years ago Google had come out and their AI couldn’t recognize certain faces as humans. The brand fame damage risk is so high that we now have to be very careful about how much AI is getting used.”
The spectrum of consequences she addressed ranged from brands coming across as robotic and out of touch to matters of credibility when unverified facts are being introduced to messaging with generative AI.
“Internally, though, there’s the worker morale and engagement risk,” she continued. “That’s becoming very real.”
Shukla framed the morale challenge as being one in all empowering and educating teams versus stoking and fueling fears.
“People are resisting adopting AI due to the risk to their jobs,” she explained. She stressed that “any of those AI tools can really be productivity-enhancing tools and don’t must be about workforce reduction in any way.”
Avoiding these pitfalls just isn’t only a communications and management issue, based on multiple speakers on stage. Because the conversation continued, they suggested confronting the very real anxieties raised through the use of AI to spice up productivity. At the identical time, they urged firms to value and leverage the human teams who use AI tools. Which will include teams who set or execute strategy. In other cases, it could include those that keep human interaction alive in customer experience.
Read more concerning the role of human expertise and the controls and limits for AI that retail leaders discussed within the second a part of this text on March 5 here on Digital Commerce 360.
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