Everyone is talking about how big an opportunity AI is for businesses, in particular, e-commerce brands. Benefits include more accurate recommendations, faster customer service responses, and more personalised marketing. But have we stopped to consider if AI is a threat, rather than an opportunity, to these businesses? In this article, we’ll discuss whether AI doesn’t help ecom brands, but actually removes the need for the service they provide.
Could AI replace personalised e-commerce?
Ecommerce has come a long way since its birth in the mid 90s. Frictionless payments, cloud-based platforms, mobile shopping and social commerce are all examples of major milestones. But the current era has seen a shift towards personalised ecommerce; recommended products based on previous activity and purchases, and hyper-personalised marketing efforts are now common practice.
But artificial intelligence is making many of these personalisation features somewhat redundant. For example, users are trusting AI to recommend everything from skincare products to new clothes.
For ecom brands that have made personalised products their whole offering, AI is a particularly interesting area. For example, Snapfish offers products such as personalised calendars and allows users to create calendars with photos from their camera roll.
However, are businesses like this in danger of being replaced by generative AI prompts? Users can now upload photos to ChatGPT and ask AI to create a calendar template using the images.
Could AI make e-commerce businesses stronger?
It’s important to consider the other side of the argument. Are creative businesses about to benefit from AI by building it into service offerings?
In the case of a business offering personalised calendars and cards, it’s probably time to consider how the creation process can either integrate AI partially or have a fully fledged AI mode.
This should make the process quicker and more efficient, and unlike generative AI tools, brands can benefit from trust and awareness. Some might argue that this is how every business should be thinking about AI. Rather than choosing a side, they should be thinking how they can harness the power of AI while relying on the years of trust they’ve built up with their audience.
Is AI a threat or an opportunity?
The truth is that AI represents both a threat and an opportunity to businesses. But the bigger threat may not be AI itself, but businesses failing to adapt to the way AI is changing user behaviour.
Along with making creative processes more efficient, AI could very well become a middle ground between product discovery and purchase. Given that users tend to trust AI to answer questions, it could become the new place where top-of-funnel users first hear about your brand. The opportunity lies in converting these users into customers.
Final Thoughts
It doesn’t matter whether your business a property management company or a customised calendar company, you must be on top of AI and the threats/opportunities it presents. But some of these threats and opportunities aren’t crystal clear. For businesses whose value lies in helping customers search, design or personalise, maybe AI isn’t a replacement, but an enhancement.
