AI Commerce - The future of online shopping
We shall hear the term AI Commerce more and more in foreseeable future. Thanks to the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence), AI Commerce will be the new experience for online shopping.
What is AI Commerce?
AI Commerce is a shopping experience where all the tedious work of reading product details, summarizing main features, going through all frequently asked questions if any will be taken care of AI-Driven technologies. It will change the way how customers interact with businesses and vice versa. Under the hood of AI commerce, you can find technologies related to AI-driven product suggestions, smart search capabilities, real-time pricing adjustments, optimized inventory control, and AI-powered customer service through chatbots. By examining customer behavior, preferences, and emerging trends, AI enables businesses to provide more relevant, timely, and seamless shopping experiences.
The shopping experience now
The current shopping experience as we know it basically starts from a search engine or a known source such as a website selling clothes or tools etc. Normally, you would have to search for something, browse multiple categories or a chain of related products, multiple filters until you find the product which may be suitable for your needs. Then you have to review the product, browse the existing reviews, try to find answers to some frequently asked questions or even contact live personnel regarding delivery times etc.
The AI Commerce experience in the future
This whole process may be optimized by implementing an AI Commerce shopping experience through AI technologies that can automate some of processes involved. In the past few months we invested into developing a real AI-based products that can bring part of the AI Commerce into real stores running on Magento 2 and WooCommerce (platforms). They are all based on cloud-based OpenAI technologies which is perfect for adding AI technologies into any store without developing and maintaining local LLM.
With AI Commerce, the mouse click will go away and eventually keyboard typing as well. For the time being however, with AI Commerce and with the way Generative AI works, people and customers can often find themselves chatting with ChatGPT or Gemini and having conversations all the time. What we wanted to achieve is to bring this conversion in the world of AI Commerce.
Just imagine
Imagine the following shopping experience. I'm looking for a professional track saw for my business. The first thing I'd do currently is to go to Festool's official site, then browse through categories, possibly notice a few track saws. I shall dive into reading specifications, comparing multiple track saws until I decide which one fits my needs and budged. This could potentially take hours, I may not decide to purchase immedialy if I'm still having doubts.
How about an AI assisted experience? What if I go to Festools's site and have a form of AI assistant, someone (or something in the case) that I can interact with and ask to do the hard work for me. The whole shopping experience will now transform into the well known conversion:
Me:
I'm looking for a professional track saw up to $900
AI buddy:
Sure, let me show you a few products that may meed your expectations.
First we have the Track Saw TS 55 FEQ-F-Plus for $680 and the second track saw that fits your budget is Cordless Track Saw TSC 55 KEB-F-Basic for $549
Me:
Sure, which one is lighter?
AI Buddy:
The Cordless Track Saw TSC 55 KEB-F-Basic is 1.2 kg. lighter, it weights 3.6 kg. while the Track Saw TS 55 FEQ-F-Plus is 4.8 kg.
Me:
Do you notice any common complains from customer reviews?
AI buddy:
It seems there are some complains about the cable length for the corded Track Saw TS 55 FEQ-F-Plus
Me:
Great, add 1 item of codless saw in my cart
AI buddy:
I have added the tracksaw to your cart, do you want me to take you to checkout so you can complete your purchase?
Now, isn't that awesome! The conversation may seem long, but I was able to first quickly get access to products that match my budget, I was also able to figure which one is lighter which is impotant in everyday work and then I figured that I may check more info regarding the cable length of the corded tracksaw prior to purchasing any of the products. Last but not least, I was typing with TYPOS and the AI assistant was still able to communicate and understand me correctly.
All of this is now becoming possible by combining AI-Driven technologies with local infrastructure and code base allowing AI models to interact with local data and be able to provide focused AI based assistance.
The conversation can be in the shape of a floating chat experience available from every page of the online shop. It can be invoked on demand or closed when not needed.
Lessons learned so far
Working on our AI Buddy and WooAI plugins and extensions for Magento 2 and WooCommerce, we had deal with multiple problems and they are still there. Using a cloud-based AI technology can bring multitude of issues starting from outages, inconsistent replies, data preparation requirements, performance issues, rendering issues and much more. While some can be mitigated, others still exist. Yet, I'm absolutely positive that AI Commerce experience will be a must anytime soon and if these tools add value to shopping experience they must be implemented.
Conclusion
AI Commerce is already happening, there are real products, real example and it's about to reshape the way we shop online. For the time being, it's not perfect because existing AI isn't perfect just like any human and it can make mistakes but with a proper architechture, proper access to tools and APIs it can transform the shopping experience and expand access to products which were never reached before.