Stop going nuts over content creation: your ecommerce business needs Generative AI

As an e-commerce business owner, you have probably been trapped in a million content tasks more than once. Social media posts, blog posts, product descriptions, ads: and the list never ends. You might be doing – or trying to do – these tasks by yourself. But it’s never enough, is it?

This is where Generative AI kicks in: a real solution to make these tasks easier and quicker. By learning from existing data, generative AI can create new content that feels human-created: product descriptions, images, and videos, and more. Ecommerce businesses can use generative AI to create more engaging and persuasive marketing materials, improve the customer experience, and even design new products.

Although Generative AI is still considered a breakthrough, it’s already substantially impacting the e-commerce industry. A recent study by Gartner found that 60% of businesses will use generative AI by 2024.

What is generative AI?

On a broad vision, AI is built to understand data and make accurate predictions. However, generative AI is a specific kind of AI that seeks to create new data that resembles the training data. For example, a traditional AI model might be trained to predict the next word in a sentence. On the other hand, a generative AI model might be instructed to generate new sentences that are similar to the sentences it was trained on. Another example: while traditional AI might be great for classifying images, generative AI is good at making them.

Maybe you hadn’t heard about generative AI, but you had heard about ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an example of text-generative AI. But generative AI can create new content on many levels, such as text, images, audio, video, coding, and even DNA. It does this by learning patterns from existing data and then using this knowledge to generate new and unique outputs.

ChatGPT is a popular text-based machine-learning model that has recently made headlines. However, it is not the first of its kind. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are two other examples of large language models released in recent years. Yandex has also launched a GPT-like neural network called YaLM 100B. 

While ChatGPT has received positive reviews, it is not without its critics. New York Times tech reporter Cade Metz and food writer Priya Krishna asked GPT to write recipes for a Thanksgiving dinner, and the results were disastrous. Despite its flaws, leading companies worldwide use AI to perform tasks and tackle productivity problems.

Generative AI can be used to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions. Machines’ capacity to create opens a big discussion about originality: since generative AI makes content that resembles other content, are we doomed to repeat the same formula forever when using generative AI? Although, if we go deeper into that thought, weren’t we already doing it on our jobs without AI?

The creative industry always talks about how to avoid repeating the same ideas. So, how do we reinvent our content creation and also use AI? Some will say the secret is what materials we feed to our generative AI tool: the art of the “prompt.” The prompt is the message you send the AI to generate the content, and the more refined the prompt, the better outcome you’ll get. So human research and criteria are not outside the content creation equation: not at all.

How can generative AI be used in an ecommerce business?

Leaving the originality discussion aside, let’s explore ways you can use generative AI to boost your ecommerce business.

Generative AI for content creation

Generative AI can help you create content like blogs, social media posts, product descriptions, and marketing materials. This can help businesses save time and money, and it can also help them create more engaging and informative content. Here are some examples of generative AI content creation tools that you can explore for your ecommerce business:

• Language models like Bard and YaLM 100B can help you write blog posts in a few seconds.
• Synthesia can help you create professional videos with human avatars. You just input a text, choose your “actor,” and you’ll have a narrator for your video in minutes.
• Generate product descriptions and optimize the ones you have so your Amazon products get seen with Sellesta’s Amazon Listing Optimization.
• Create social media images by giving the AI two or three words with neural.love.
• Sellesta’s Amazon Ads can help you acquire more users through engaging ads on Amazon. This tool also includes a human quality check to ensure the Ads you get are relevant and effective for your business.
• Jasper is a powerful AI writing assistant that can help you with many tasks, including content creation, email writing, and social media management. It is a bit more expensive than other AI content creation tools, but it is worth the investment if you are looking for a high-quality tool.

Generative AI to engage customers and upsell

Generative AI can assist you in personalizing customer experiences and driving your conversion rate. Give your buyers personalized recommendations, generate customized emails, and even create friendly chatbots. By doing all this, Gen-AI helps ecommerce businesses improve customer loyalty and engagement. Here are some interesting tools:

• Create dynamic marketing content with just text. An incredible tool that creates videos is Elai.
• Have a hyper-personalized customer support chatbot with Polyai.
• Give your users product recommendations based on usage patterns with Sellesta’s Website Personalization and make your users 20% more prone to return to your site.

Generative AI to engage employees

Generative AI can aid in engaging employees in several ways, including:

• Simplify the enterprise research: Generative AI can be used to supercharge the enterprise search, making it easier and quicker for employees to find the information they need. This can help employees to be more productive and to make better decisions. A good example is glean.
• Providing personalized coaching: Generative AI can deliver customized coaching to employees, offering guidance and helping them improve their productivity. This can help employees to feel more supported and engaged with their work. A trendy choice is Better Up.
• Generating insights for HR teams: Generative AI can be used to give insights to HR teams based on employment history, helping to identify areas where employees need support and to initiate specific and targeted interventions. Predictive HR is quite a complete tool that uses AI to generate reports and make HR tasks more accessible and efficient.

Concerns about Generative AI

As much as Generative AI has been praised and widely applied, it has its downside. For example, ChatGPT’s breadth of sources makes its content creation very general and bland. There’s also the story of the lawyer who presented a case created by ChatGPT, and it turned out that most of his evidence was fake.

While generative AI is a promising technology, it is essential to be aware of its limitations. To ensure the quality of AI-generated content, also known as “synthetic content,” you must have processes and methods. This involves having a human in the loop to review the content or even using another AI to double-check.

It is also crucial to be aware that the models used for generative AI are trained on data that is available online. This data can include copyrighted content, articles, and other protected information. If this data is not properly reviewed, it could lead to legal problems for your business.

Generative AI or out

The rise of Generative AI has transformed many industries, including e-commerce. With the ability to generate new content such as product descriptions, images, and even new products, Generative AI can revolutionize the e-commerce industry. You can save your company a lot of time and money if you early-adopt Gen-AI-powered tools, and you can even develop better products and marketing strategies. This will keep you ahead of the competition.

As Uncle Ben told Peter in Spiderman, “Great power comes with great responsibility.” Besides Gen-AI’s great potential, we need to consider that –perhaps more than ever– we require experienced human professionals that understand how to use AI to their advantage. The competition has sharpened, and it expects us to create even better content and products with the help of AI.

Marketing managers, product developers, head-hunters, CEOs: every worker in the system will have to try the available tools to do their jobs faster and better. This is a reality for those who want to keep ahead of the game. Those who don’t understand the magnitude of these technologies will more likely cut their chances of keeping afloat in the business. 

If you want to find more cool Generative AI tools to help your ecommerce, check out Sellesta’s website, and book a demo.