Discover the current and future impact of new artificial intelligence technologies on all aspects of the e-commerce industry: logistics, acquisition, conversion, shopping experience and after-sales service.
The arrival of GPT at the very end of 2022 and the acceleration phase around generative AI / LLM that followed throughout 2023 initiated the reshaping of many industries, including e-commerce.
Here, we explore some of the most striking advances in AI for e-commerce.
In terms of customer service, thanks to improved natural language processing and a much larger knowledge base, the new chatbots are now capable of understanding and answering complex queries.
In this way, they provide real-time customer service 24/7, avoiding the need to navigate lengthy FAQs or wait for a customer service agent to become available.
For example, CDiscount has launched a chatbot that answers questions formulated in natural language (currently only about household appliances).
Another remarkable development concerns logistics, where technological advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible to further automate supply chains, predicting demand with great precision in order to reduce storage costs while avoiding stock-outs.
For example, Engie optimizes its maintenance operations with Vekia: the 230 branches automate orders and improve the availability of spare parts for technicians.
With regard to thebuyer experience, the leap made in image recognition enables consumers to virtually see products in their own environment before making a purchase, thus improving the shopping experience and consumer confidence.
For example, the Valentino fashion house is collaborating with Farfetch's Wanna, to introduce an exclusive virtual fitting experience: customers can virtually view and try on pieces from the collection.
Still on the buyer experience side, the significant improvement in AI-based recommendation systems makes it possible to offer truly personalized product recommendations, based on consumers' product preferences, but also their browsing behavior, including time spent on pages, clicks, scroll, ...
For example, Watson Personality Insights analyzes social profiles to personalize recommendations. The North Face uses this technology to create a virtual personal shopper, asking questions about the intended use of the jacket and suggesting the most suitable model based on the answers and weather conditions.
The forthcoming arrival of response-generated search will also revolutionize the shopping experience: Google SGE, which is already being deployed in beta in the USA and will arrive in Europe in early 2024, will replace the usual list of search results with an AI-generated response, quoting from 1 to 3 sites used to generate the response.
This is one of the advances most likely to turn the online retail industry upside down, as SEO/acquisition strategy must now focus on providing as much product information as possible, in order to increase the chances of participating in the search engine-generated response.
Finally, 2023 was also marked by the arrival of AI accelerating the creation of online catalogs, they enable theautomation of repetitive, time-consuming and error-pronetasks, which often hinder business development, reduce catalog quality and performance, and cause dissatisfaction for buyers.
In particular, generative AI enables very rapid enrichment and standardization of product attributes, necessary to correctly feed search filters, present key information to buyers, create SEO landing pages and generate qualitative descriptions.
For example, Algocat's solution enables auditing (identifying priority problems to be corrected), enrichment (classification, extraction and standardization) and generation of product titles and descriptions.
In conclusion, the year 2023 has seen the start of profound upheavals for the e-commerce industry, with all their activities already or soon to be impacted: logistics, acquisition, conversion, shopping experience, after-sales service, ...
This is an exceptional opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition!