Hajo Eichler, CTO at commercetools, explores how Generative AI can enhance businesses’ commerce capabilities and customer experience.
Much of the 2023 mainstream headlines and conversations on AI centred on the benefit to consumer audiences. A year later, the spotlight has shifted to how businesses are reaping the rewards of AI-enabled technology, the costs of ignoring it and who is getting it right.
Of course, technologists have long recognised AI’s advantages in automation, task management, improved customer experience, efficiency and personalisation. Many consumers were already benefitting from AI adoption before it became newsworthy. If you found this article through a link on social media – that’s AI in action!
As a result, businesses that were late to adopt AI are now exploring how it can enhance their commerce capabilities and customer experience. Currently, 84% of e-commerce brands are actively implementing AI solutions or prioritising them.
So, what exactly does Generative AI specifically have to offer? Inarguably, that would be intelligent interactions.
Product search & recommendations
First, the right application of GenAI technology can significantly improve product search. Traditional keyword search methods often struggle to yield sufficient results, but GenAI enhances relevance and product discovery by interpreting user searches and suggesting alternatives in the background to show more products.
Additionally, GenAI takes consumer preference insights a step further by offering personalised recommendations that align with each customer’s interests. Unlike standard recommendation engines with static rules, GenAI adapts to user data in real-time, ensuring an up-to-date and dynamic customer experience.
Review summaries
While reviews serve as the digital alternative to word of mouth, the sheer volume of feedback can be overwhelming for customers to sift through. GenAI can help summarise this feedback, making it easier to digest. Amazon recently seized this opportunity, launching an AI feature to generate a well-rounded summary, highlighting the positives, negatives and overall outlook of the product.
These are just a handful of ways GenAI can enhance the online customer experience. But this tech requires careful consideration to truly harness its value.
An infrastructure fit for the future
AI isn’t a cheap investment. That’s why an AI strategy should never be about getting all the tech but identifying areas where it can offer the most value in the customer journey. However, taking a selective approach to AI adoption isn’t always possible with e-commerce architectures.
Typically, e-commerce infrastructures are monolithic, ‘out of the box’ systems, that don’t enable custom plug-ins, making AI integration a much larger job. This can be a costly and time-consuming sacrifice to make. Fortunately, with an alternative, modular infrastructure, businesses can operate with composable systems that allow for smaller applications. With a cloud-native environment, built to facilitate robust APIs, businesses can integrate GenAI in a meaningful way, while also facilitating scalability. Not only does
this simplify and streamline the process, but it also offers the flexibility to adapt to changing market needs.
Gearing up for what’s to come
GenAI is well on its way to becoming a critical technology for e-commerce, helping retailers provide a hyper-personalised and seamless shopping experience. While still in its early stages of maturity, brands cannot afford to overlook the vast opportunities GenAI has to offer.
As AI experiments become real-life integrations, brands need to ensure their commerce technology is primed for the future and able to keep up with changing markets to remain competitive.