How AI Will Drive The Online Commerce Space For Content In 2023

Anand Siva Feb 14, 2023

“Older people sit down and ask what is it. But a younger one will ask what can I do with it,” said Steve Jobs.

That are a few words is what AI is doing today. It is cutting across all levels of imagination and bringing with it a new revelation every day. For a long time, I have been saying this: AI is better referred to as OI – Outsourced Intelligence. What you can’t do at speed, scale and precision, AI can. And for a human brain that has its own set restrictions, it only makes sense to outsource the higher level of thinking to a machine programmed by a human to do just that.

This is why every new piece of technology that comes in will need to be reimagined. Creators of AI engines could invariably have a myopic view of their product. That’s because they create AI engines to serve a specific purpose. It is only those who experience the product that can think of various other means to use it to solve their own problem. When they know their problems and must find solutions in areas outside their realm, they must find unconventional solutions to complex problems and that’s exactly what AI is doing to the world of content. A space hitherto ruled over by creative agencies, guarding their turf as they did to their 15 per cent agency commissions 2 decades ago.

AI is raising doubts about the need for human intellect in areas that need more of the same, and variety as an add-on. Repetitive, synonymous and redundant content all need nothing but smart engineering to build mass and scale. And no other vertical is more demanding of speed and scale as ecom – the sheer size of the online commerce place demands that everything be automated. There’s no room for manual processes, which only slows down the industry on roller skates. What can AI do here, and why is it going to be the most significant change here?

Consider this, Amazon in English-speaking markets alone hosts over a billion products. And that translates to a billion unique pages for each product. Brands could have hundreds of products listed. Now add their listings across other platforms, and you suddenly look at hundreds of pages and thousands of images to be managed. And then keep adding new marketplaces, new geographies, new frameworks and changing style-guides. The challenges of managing this are nothing but mindboggling. This is the opportunity we identified as a big space, why we built an AI-driven platform to check and optimise these listings. And every brand we have spoken to has only lamented about how they got it done manually, and the risk of riding on possible human fallacies. AI has changed the way we audit pages and identify gaps for brands to fix. Running hundreds of pages a day.

Do the challenges end there? Take into account the changes a brand must make. Content Generation engines, chat GPT only icing on the cake, are redefining the speed of generating the content, while hundreds of image processing platforms are creating ecom-ready adaptations, extracting product specs from images to create meta tags that are hastening GTM timelines. The fashion industry – apparel especially, with its long tail and ever-changing merchandise will make the most of these technologies. From just clearing background clutter a couple of years ago, AI today enables slapping new products on models and creating 360-degree views and animated ramp walks to deliver a greater customer experience. With nothing but one photograph of the apparel. What were days of planning, shooting, retouching and rendering are now a click.

When you take into account the fact that AI is nothing but a monumental pile of data analysed in microseconds, you will see how it is changing business lines across verticals. Identifying ingredients calling out health benefits finding related recipes to adding missing ingredients to a shopping list is now an ordinary flow of data, as intelligence moves from a product pack to a health blog to a recipe app to an Amazon shopping list. Wink, and it is done.

And AI has just come of age. From days when everything with a slice of automation was pegged as AI, we are now seeing unique ideas putting superior technology into usable products. I expect AI to take over education and health in a big way, changing the way we related to machine-driven intelligence. I call it content engineering. And it has just got started.