How Generative AI Can Revolutionize E-Commerce Content Creation

LONDON & NEW YORK, July 20, 2023, There has been a lot of hype around generative artificial intelligence and for good reason. It opens up a plethora of opportunities, including in the areas of commerce and content. Gen AI technology presents a lot of potential, especially in e-commerce.

In the next three to five years, generative AI could boost the operating profits of the apparel, fashion, and luxury sectors by up to $275 billion, according to a McKinsey analysis. While navigating this quickly evolving landscape can be complex, there are great opportunities to be had by those who venture into it.

But let’s start by talking about the big issue. Is AI going to steal our jobs? There has been concern about the prospect of generative AI replacing humans in occupations related to marketing, content creation, and e-commerce merchandising.

While it’s true that machine learning and AI are growing increasingly sophisticated and capable of carrying out jobs previously only performed by humans, it’s crucial to remember that these technologies are still in their infancy. In fact, many marketing and e-commerce experts think that rather than replacing human workers, AI will open up new opportunities for them.

AI can assist humans in making better decisions and concentrating on the more creative and strategic aspects of their work by automating some tasks and providing insightful data and insights. Here are three ways that generative AI could help people be more productive at work with regard to content creation:

1. Support and Augmentation

AI-powered solutions bolster human capabilities. They provide rapid support, automate routine operations, make wise recommendations, and boost productivity and efficiency. They aid people in doing in-depth data analysis, producing insights, and reaching well-informed conclusions. From a content perspective, these tools help to refine content by assisting with consistency, language optimization, and proofreading.

2. Producing Unique Content

Generative models combine deep learning and natural language processing to produce content that imitates human ingenuity. However, they function best when integrated with human creativity and judgment. They are useful for brainstorming, exploring styles, and optimizing operations.

3. Content Validation

AI-powered generative tools that analyze data sources, fact-check statements, and spot any biases or inconsistencies help verify content’s correctness, authenticity, and credibility. These resources can help consumers and content producers encourage accuracy, make wise decisions, and combat false information.

Cutting-edge tools like AI and generative technology can increase productivity, inspire creativity, and deftly traverse the digital environment. Simply said, we do not currently have enough highly talented individuals to efficiently produce all the material we may need to meet the expectations of a business that requires a continuous flow of new contextual content.

With AI, you can develop tailored, contextually relevant content on an industrial scale that will help you boost conversion rates and sales.

Gen AI Content for Commerce

Generative AI uses foundation models to create new information, as opposed to standard AI, which simply recognizes and categorizes information. These deep-learning models are developed on vast, unstructured data sets that applications like GPT-3.5 and DALL-E can use to handle numerous complex tasks concurrently.

During the initial stages of incorporating generative AI foundation models into e-commerce content, we will witness the integration of functionality by embedding them into CMS, PIM, and customer service.

This approach involves using chatbots like GPT to modify the text to improve it, make it more engaging, or generate original copy based on a prompt and premise, such as product descriptions. This approach is efficient for long-form content, blogs, and editorial or optimizing titles for engagement and SEO.

Rich images are essential in e-commerce to create an emotional connection with a product and promote it in context. While copy may be required, video and imagery are even more crucial in a virtual environment, given the absence of a physical product.

Fortunately, AI-powered image creation has considerably improved, as demonstrated by Dall-E and Bling Image Creator (Dall-E 2). With these technologies, businesses can produce stunning visuals that vividly illustrate their products’ functions and unique selling aspects for consumers.

Current Limitations of Generative AI

Generic applications of generative AI may initially appear impressive, but because of their broad base models and datasets, they lack originality, inventiveness, and distinctiveness. Since these models are trained on big datasets often sourced from the internet, everyone using the same AI model will produce similar content.

Customers may lose interest because of the lack of personalization since there will be an abundance of content that all sounds and look the same. Businesses will need to include unique context and a human touch in their content creation to stand out from the competition as AI becomes more commonplace.

This situation highlights a critical opportunity for companies to develop foundation models tailored specifically to other verticals, like retail, fashion, and housewares, that could revolutionize customer experiences, for instance, by making product detail pages more interactive by generating personalized media content based on customer prompts and interactions.

Images Alone Not Enough To Sell

You need more than just photos to market products on home pages and landing pages effectively. In actuality, copy and images must be related and blended.

Consequently, you must train generative AI content in commerce with your product information, graphics, and marketing content for promoting and selling the products. Combining product, content, and data makes it feasible to quickly release products with all of their necessary content and regularly update this content in response to customer needs, market dynamics, social trends, and one-time events.

This evolution does not imply that humans will no longer be involved in the process. Instead of copying and pasting data into spreadsheets across many systems, people may instead focus on higher-value work with fine-tuning, editing, and coordination. The backend staff can also concentrate on finding fresh, high-quality images, precise product information, usable experience components, and AI training.

Tailor E-Commerce Content With Generative AI

Incorporating generative AI into companies’ content production will result in a production system capable of creating immense amounts of contextually relevant content, opening the door to personalization, where generating such a volume of content would allow for tailoring and delivery to various data points, such as customer preferences, location, and channel.

With this capability, it will be feasible to generate numerous sets of e-commerce content that are contextually relevant to each customer, their position in the purchase path, and the channel they are using. All of this will help to increase conversion rates and drive sales for your business.