Gartner: Three ways to leverage generative AI to improve digital commerce

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is an emerging technology that has a disruptive impact on content generation and conversational user interfaces. In many fields such as digital commerce, GenAI has shown great business and application prospects. According to the 2023 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, 14% of respondents have already invested in GenAI to support their marketing strategy, while 63% plan to do the same in the next 24 months. It can be seen that corporate organizations are moving quickly to realize the potential and value of GenAI.

Over the past few months, application leaders have learned a lot about GenAI, but they still need to answer two key questions: What role can GenAI play, and How to combine it with existing technology, especially its specific applications in e-commerce and other fields. The role and main impact of GenAI in the e-commerce field mainly covers the following three aspects (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Three ways in which generative artificial intelligence can enhance digital commerce

GenAI has both advantages and limitations and can add value to existing e-commerce technologies

The power shown by GenAI has caused confusion among people, that is, whether the technology will replace existing technology, or even replace development teams. For example, some Gartner clients want to know if GenAI can be used to build e-commerce websites, thereby avoiding the need to invest in expensive applications and implementations. However, the fact is that although GenAI can assist in building some basic websites, its functions are not yet mature and cannot fully meet the complex customer experience and management functions required by enterprise customers. Therefore, GenAI will synergize with existing e-commerce technologies rather than replace them. In addition, GenAI will also work with discriminative AI (the AI ​​technology currently used in most e-commerce applications) to support functions such as search and personalization.

Normally, enterprises need to use GenAI in conjunction with discriminative AI and other technologies, such as search engines, digital assets, knowledge bases, analysis tools, and rules engines, to obtain relevant results. GenAI can rarely accomplish a task on its own, so many technology vendors have embedded GenAI capabilities into their solutions. This is the easiest and cheapest way for organizations to leverage GenAI.

GenAI improves user experience by boosting creativity, insights, personalized experiences and conversational UI

E-commerce applications and discriminative AI have become powerful tools for managing different elements of an enterprise. Such as products, customers, pricing and rules. These elements are the data foundation that GenAI relies on to improve existing functions or deliver new functions. For example, discriminative AI can extract product attributes by analyzing text descriptions and images of existing products. GenAI can then create entirely new product descriptions and images based on these attributes, combined with the product itself and brand positioning. This combination of technologies brings more innovation and competitive advantages to enterprises.

GenAI can improve e-commerce user experience in the following ways:

• Improve creativity: GenAI can broaden the horizons of human designers, inspire new ideas, and promote product and design innovation;
• Discover insights: A large amount of e-commerce data and insights are scattered in different systems, making their search and use difficult for business users. With the power of prompt engineering and search engines, GenAI can discover signals and patterns hidden in data to quickly provide support to business users;
• Personalized experience: Create personalized experiences based on relevant customer data and situational information Communicate messages and content to improve customer engagement, including message open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates;
• Conversational user experience: GenAI excels in natural language processing and generation to improve conversational experiences for customers and employees .

GenAI can serve as a virtual employee assistant to improve employee productivity

GenAI excels at handling multiple tasks, especially those related to content generation and insight aggregation. It can serve as a virtual assistant to help employees complete work tasks. However, GenAI does not have the ability to define subtasks. Subtasks need to be defined through workflows or corresponding package applications, and then GenAI can complete these subtasks respectively to achieve the overall goal. E-commerce workflows are usually very complex and involve enterprise-specific data, systems and processes. Therefore, organizations must maintain control of their workflows and not cede control to GenAI.

Enterprise organizations should:

• Build a technology portfolio covering all AI technology types and make full use of the advantages of various AI technologies. For example, GenAI is used to generate new content and create conversational user interfaces (UI), and discriminative AI is used for classification and prediction.
• Realize the interaction between e-commerce applications and GenAI, and provide the latter with necessary data (such as product, customer and order data) through the former to achieve optimal performance.
• Identify e-commerce workflow tasks (e.g., sales cycle, sales planning) that can be automated and add value using GenAI, especially those involving new content creation and insight aggregation.

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