Gaining a Competitive Edge Embracing AI for a Seamless Customer Journey

Good afternoon everyone I am Commerce next co-founder Veronica SV and I want to thank you so much for joining us today so for any new participants Commerce next is a community event series and conference for marketing e-commerce and Technology leaders at retail and direct to Consumer brands and on behalf of my fellow co-founders Scott Silverman and Alan dick I want to welcome you to today's Webinar our topic is gaining a Competitive Edge embracing AI for a seamless customer Journey now the retail industry has been buzzing about AI for a few years now but most retailers

are just starting to implement AI Solutions still AI has the power to transform almost all aspects of e-commerce from creating efficiency to enabling new experiences AI will allow us to evolve much faster than Traditional Technologies and algorithms really could so today we're going to look at how AI can help us create a seamless customer journey we'll cover operational efficiencies gain from AI best practices for hyper-personalization how AI can improve loyalty and so much more but before we dig in I want to walk through a few thank yous and announcements so first of all I want

to thank um fabric it has been a pleasure To partner with them on this webinar I also want to thank our amazing speakers Derek yarboro former CMO at J crew hecta Chopra Chief digital officer at elf Beauty Vivian Chang vice president e-commerce at GNC Amy selino former vice president of growth and Performance Marketing at Len and Christine fla CMO at I also want to thank our team mave Robert Scott Allan Tracy and Jenny who are working behind the scenes to make this webinar a success and finally I Want to thank you the audience for joining

us today our next webinar um is on December 11th it's an audience favorite Scott Silverman's going to host our cyberweek recap Lessons Learned and advice for 2025 this webinar will start with a presentation by Jason Goldberg um and he does an amazing job really giving us a debrief on what happened during cyber followed by a panel with tapestry hanky panky taylored BRS and session Ai and They're going to discuss what they're seeing in market so you want to make sure to register follow the link it's a webinar you're not going to want to miss speaking

of not wanting to miss anything um please remember to register for the 2025 Commerce next Grow Show it's taking place June 24th to 26 in New York City we're currently offering a limited number of VIP tickets and those VIP tickets give you access to Fast Pass registration two for one tickets and Free swag via our brand boder so our team will be sharing the link to sign up in the chat we only have 200 VIP tickets so don't wait to register now if you missed any of our past sessions our webinars or anything that we've

produced um our YouTube channel is a wealth of information you just go to youtube.com/ convers nextt and you'll see our entire video arom now don't worry if you miss anything today we do record these Webinars we make them available usually by the next today I'm going to quickly walk you through where everything is on the screen and then we'll get started so first of all the panel on the right this is where all the interactivity happens and there has a a number of different points of functionality first chat is where you can tell us where

you're calling in from you can give the speakers high fives you can interact with other audience members But if you have a question we really encourage you to use the Q&A Tab and that's because it has some additional functionality functionality like the ability to upvote questions so we know what's most important to you now to encourage audience questions we're giving away a Commerce next branded Yeti 10 oun lowball tumbler it's perfect for a morning coffee or a kip fire cocktail um to enter to win it's really simple you just post a question In the Q&A

Tab and if that question is posted to the panel that's essentially an entry to win um this giveaway is open to eligible participants in the US and Canada and each question you ask boost your chances so ask lots of questions and good luck now um around the midpoint of this webinar we usually do audience polls we will have audience polls um the live questions will pop up on your screen but if you want to see the results um we'll Talk about them you just go to the polls Tab and you can see the numbers live

and then finally we have the handouts for this webinar um the slides as well as some handouts from fabric are ailable in the handout section and for those who are not watching live but are going to catch the replay that handout link is at the bottom of your player so our agenda for today we have a presentation by Derek Goro on embracing AI for a seamless customer Journey um And then we have audience polls um and then a panel discussion with elf Beauty J crew GNC L end and and now it's with great pleasure that

I get to introduce Derrick Goro he's the former CMO at J crew and maidwell and an adviser to he's being joined actually by christelle FL CMO at fabric welcome thank you Veronica um thanks for everyone for joining and thanks for having me uh my name is Derek Goro I am The former CMO for J K and mawell um currently an adviser for fabric um as well as Commerce next um we are going to uh run through just a few slides to um set a little bit of context on AI in the Retail Landscape before um

having the panel discussion um so first you know I in preparation for this um I wanted to think a little bit about the history of e-commerce and Retail and how that might have some Clues as to how AI is going to continue to evolve it um I consider the Birth of e-commerce um really um the mid90s um when eBay and Amazon were born as some of the really first pioneers of e-commerce so we're now talking 30 years um of e-commerce and one thing that has definitely hold true through those 30 years is a constant state

of disruption and evolution so we saw that with you know the disruption with Broadband uh mobile adoption deprecation of cookies um so many different stages of e-commerce I think most recently um The pandemic which really accelerated um digital adoption in even the most mature Legacy retailers um and I think what we're seeing now um with AI is the acceleration of evolution and disruption is ex is just unparalleled um and we're going to talk a little bit about what that means so the bar really truly has been raised um you know I think one of the

ways that I would Characterize the landscape today um if you guys are familiar with last year's Oscar winner um everything everywhere all at once that's really how i' characterize um the current landscape just that consumers are in more places and shopping more Brands than ever before and I think in that landscape Brands need to think about two things one how do I get my product to show up in all of these places all these devices channels social platforms marketplaces To get in front of consumers on all this uh you know vast array of places where

consumers are engaging and shopping with Brands and second how do I orchestrate orders in this much more complex ecosystem so even though this ecosystem is more complex customers still expect the same level of transparency and seem experience across the order purchase experience and post-p purchase experience as if they were shopping directly with a Brand's website it Doesn't matter if it was a Marketplace or on Tik Tock shop they still expect the same level of service so you know what then that means for AI and where the opportunity comes in I think the most important thing

is to understand that AI will touch every part of the retail value t retail value chain um AI will be used to help manage and streamline getting products out there in more places efficiently and beautifully um and also managing the Order experience um from pre current and postp purchase um much more seamlessly and transparently um so again AI will touch every aspect of the value chain from product conception and design merchandising a inventory planning order management personalized customer experience and even enhancing offline experiences um it's my belief that in the near term what we're going

to see is a hyperfocus on Efficiency um and that's really the first I would say first stage of AI is just really thinking about how can AI automate um aspects of my business excuse me and fundamentally this is the correct place to start so asking the question what are the easiest places to drive Automation in my business that allows human capital to focus more energy on more complex and more value added activities so in thinking about Efficiency obvious areas might include uh automation of forecasting uh optimization of fulfillment um streamling operations on the marketing side

this might be things like improving product recommendations generating SEO copy generating multiple versions of image crops for pdps those things as the efficiency play starts leveling out as more and more Brands adopt AI I think we're going to see this shift happening where there's Much more invest m in AI as a tool for differentiation um and so really when you start thinking about the kind of art of the possible with AI in terms of things like truly creating AI agents to interact with customers or creating really incredible personalized customer Journeys and experiences for your customers

that stuff is for most brands going to be more advanced there are certainly Brands thinking about this already today but I would argue that the First step is to really think more about the efficiency and automation as building blocks that then when you have those in place and you start combining them they become opportunities to do differentiation so it's almost like a start with the building blocks and really think about all the different little pieces before you go to you know from zero to 100 overnight on creating personal experiences um that's really how I would

think about it At a high level um the most important thing to think about for AI um for a successful AI strategy is really starting with data um you know there's a lot of sayings like good data in or bad data in bad data out really so you're you know getting to a place where you're actually thinking about differentiating um customer experiences or creating personalized Journeys it's going to start with data and I would Argue for a lot of companies um your first step before you even think about an AI strategy is really think about

your data strategy that's where a lot of this is going to start and you think about a lot of organizations today um data's typically pretty siloed um you know and owned in disperate functions so you might have a POS uh data Silo you might have a customer data Silo you know web event um data Silo Market platforms um you know I'm sure there's Even others that are not listed on this site um so I think step number one is really to think about what is your company's data strategy and how is that the foundation for

your AI strategy that might um you know include a solution around a unified data strategy a unified customer data platform that ties all of these pieces together I think you know that that idea of a unified data um Source um can be very expensive or it can be very tricky and and difficult Especially in in a large organization there are ways um to think about a data strategy that isn't just about a single uh you know Silo of all your data in all the different places you could take the approach of uh a data mesh

strategy where there's still uh separate um you know repositories for data for different aspects of the business but they're planned and governed from a centralized um point of view and there's aspects of how do you link those uh link The data how do you give AI access to the different sources of data so that it's almost like an agent um if you will um knows okay I need to piece together customer data from this Silo and web event data from this Silo in order to form a better picture um regardless of which strategy do you

choose the important point or takeaway is to have a data strategy before you have an AI strategy so now I'm going to hand it off to uh cristelle to talk a little bit More about the the order orchestration piece explicitly perfect thanks Derek um and thanks for that great tea up uh hi I'm Crystal Flo I'm the CMO at Fabric and and one of the big challenges we've been starting to tackle is how do we simplify this this orchestrating of demand and fulfillment um I love the nod to that movie everything everywhere all at once

uh this is what it feels like for for Retailers today right how do you keep up with all of the different channels all of your different fulfillment centers um your stores as fulfillment centers like how do you keep all of that data flowing give the visibility across all of those aspects um so if we want to move to the next slide this this is why I'm super excited about what we've been working on which is really this concept of orchestrating the order so uh I am happy to announce today our AI powered uh Order orchestration

Suite which actually allows us to connect the demand side of the house to the Fulfillment side of the house and give this real- time inventory uh that is been this quest for everybody for a very very long time and just starts to get even more complicated in the world we live in today as well as the World we're going into um so for us there's four key benefits to looking at the world this way uh first is selling more with real-time inventory right how Do we get more inventory into the hands of the consumers when

they want it and where they want it the next one is the one I'm really excited about which is AI Innovation around order fulfillment so fulfill from the most optimal location with automated insights and actions right in the platform that allow you to take actions like reducing split shipments and increasing customer satisfaction all manage in a configurable UI that's easy to use Through natural language um that really helps you make changes at the speed of business and help you become a differentiated uh a differentiated company in the market the other one here is really around

flexible store fulfillment so it's TurnKey and gives you the flexibility to launch these store fulfillment Services fast whether it's something like bopus or ship from store you can prioritize incoming features Incoming orders adjust inventory and manage transfers in real time with an easy to use more Mobile store fulfillment app and the last piece of this is because every single retailer is trying to juggle a bunch of different applications um across the demand side and the Fulfillment size fulfillment side is this integrated ecosystem so easy to use Integrations that allow you to really start to see

that data flow from one side to the other uh this is is Where I think and the company thinks that OMS is going right order management uh it's definitely a new wave of thinking about order management which has typically been in the back uh of a lot of people's um Tech stack but really using that as a competitive advantage to increase demand uh for the front end of your operations so we have three questions um for the audience our first first question um is a repeat of what we asked Last week but we're interested to

kind of see how this audience checked your temperature on where you are from an AI perspective so how far along is your company on their AI journey and you have four options here Advanced so you're currently using AI throughout your e-commerce experience intermediate you have maybe one or two AI Technologies in production you're looking at more beginner you're starting to experiment with AI or D haven't really started yet So this is a more advanced Group which is great um we're seeing about 9% of you um list yourself as advanced uh 39% of you listing yourself

as intermediate so you have one or two AI Technologies in production um 33% beginner and um 18% or now I guess 35% beginner um and 18% haven't really started yet and it's perfect no matter where you are kind of in your AI Journey because we're going to touch on a lot of different things that'll help you um take this further We asked a similar question on on last week's webinar which just focused on tactical talks and um it was almost equally split between intermediate and beginner um so this is a clearly a little bit more

of an advanced group from an AI perspective which is wonderful um our second question is what has been the biggest challenge when it comes to implementing Ai and our options there are a building a business case for the technology investment B unifying Disparate sources of data which d talked about in his presentation C Technical Resources for implementing AI Solutions D compliance and legal issues surrounding the use of AI e finding concrete use cases that will work for your particular business or something or F something else and in which case we'd love for you to specify

in the chat the biggest challenge and this is consistent with what I've heard at our various events is unifying disperate sources of Data I think um a combination of just having and new technologies and just being able to get all of that in the place in one place is is a consistent thing that we've heard that's a challenge for this industry the second biggest challenge is the Technical Resources for implementing AI we're going to talk about both of those things um during the panel discussion and then tied for third is is the business case and

the legal issues and um and then Finding concrete use cases and something else and then our last question is is related to our cyber week um webinar well we would love to get you guys to answer is how do you expect holiday sales to compare to plan um a much higher than Plan B somewhat higher than plan C at Plan D slightly less than plan or E much less than plan 44% are now saying they expect it to be at plan um about 25% expect it to be above plan somewhat Higher and about 25% expected

to be below plan so um really interesting to kind of see that um we have um 6% saying much less than plan um so the majority it seems like it's going to be for majority of people it's going to be basically at plan so let's see um and good luck this holiday season um and now it's with great pleasure that I get to bring up the panel and we get to go into the discussion hi Everyone hello hello so the audience got to meet Derek and cristelle earlier now I want to just quickly introduce the

other panelists um ecta chopras the chief digital officer at elf Beauty we have Vivian Chang she's the vice president of e-commerce at GNC and Amy selino who's the former vice president of growth and Performance Marketing at L end welcome everyone we're excited to get into this discussion um I want to start us off With a rapid fire question because I think kind of Derek did a great kind of setup in terms of like where is AI today and where um is it going I guess if you could look at how AI has helped how will

AI how has a AI helped get this question out how has AI helped retailers reshape the customer journey and if you could just pick one example of the most promising AI use case that you've seen what would it be um and Derek since you're like right next to me on the Screen I'm going to start with you and then go to Amy celle sure well I I I mean I think everyone can tell I'm obsessed with data and data strategy and I think you know an area that I just feel like is low hanging fruit

for most um businesses is looking at all of your e-commerce data for people who are not converting and really tapping into that using AI of like what how can you use AI to better understand what customers are doing on Your website even those that are not converting right A lot of people will come to your site and they're shopping they're getting inspiration they're comparing products and AI could really be used to figure out okay here's a whole bunch of customers who are actively shopping and comparing coats or shoes how can you use that data to

then create experiences um you know to further move those customers down the funnel I think that's a when you think About the amount of data that's there um it's incredible Amy what do you think I I've got three actually um I've seen some really interesting things as far as generating Dynamic landing pages uh category Pages specifically um or some people call them plps product listing Pages for longtail SEO queries um as a way to drive traffic and maybe decrease uh the burden on paid social or uh paid search excuse me um Adept mind does that

As well as some other companies um when I was at Cerberus I had the you know benefit of sitting like with the data science team they had worked on a really interesting AI technology that helped predict the ROI of influencers in Social um they use the apis out of YouTube and Facebook um and you know the alternative to that is you get a bunch of names from an agency and you just throw things at the wall and see see what works so um that was really exciting I I've seen a Company called Ben Labs adverti

the same um and then the last one which I think I'm going to talk about later when we talk about discounting you know the ability to differentiate offers based on the consumer's propensity to buy based on their clip click behavior on a site which I think is really exciting in terms of you know saving margin for for retailers and Brands alike yeah absolutely and actually session AI which is one of the companies That does that will be sponsoring the next webinar and speaking on the next webinar cristelle what are you seeing um I need to

go back fabric of course besides fabric yeah uh look I think going back to what Derek said just around data but you know that data from an inventory perspective right so I think there's a lot of interest around you know how do you make sure how can you accurately forecast demand at the skew level um you know how do you get All of that that R product information into that same kind of uh view right so there's less of this swivel chair happening um so that you can meet customer expectations um and you can do

so really really fast I think from a backend perspective there's a lot that AI can do on an efficiency front um and also in a visibility front so that's where we're excited to see AI um be be applied awesome backa what are you seeing my God so many use cases so how Do you pick one right but I do think from the ones that have already been mentioned um I think there's tremendous opportunity on the creative side to really serve sort of the hyper personalizing ation but if you have all your data structure right you

have uh sort of all the understanding of your consumer journey and how consumers are purchasing the next big thing that you have to solve for is a a creative supply chain so I think that's where AI can Have a huge impact yeah yeah both in terms of giving you creative ideas as well as like iterating on the various um variants that you need for the different platforms exactly Vivian what are you saying uh I'm going to pick a slightly different kind of area than where folks have been talking um and go with digital shelf optimization

so on the retail side where you have thousands of SKS that you Have to create product content for you how oftentimes I think historically it's been you know the R&D team decides what pack is going to look like or marketing has an input um where I'm excited is actually leveraging AI tools creating almost like the Target demographic target audience as uh a simulated panel and then you can have an objective score when you look at um even designing uh product imagery before it is actually in production um and then You extend that all the way

down to uh metadata into descriptions how do you actually cater it to the audience um and so I'm really excited for both the efficiency side but also just the effectiveness um that will come for a digital shelf awesome very interesting a lot of different kind of uses of AI already of brought up in this conversation um I want to just um Derek I want to follow up because Ann Sophie ril Haw I hope I pronounced your last name right from Los she had a question if you had any examples of a vendor or any vendor

recommendations for the non-converter customer to be able to like understand that non-converter customer is there anyone that comes to mind that does that um um gosh I I was caught off guard there there definitely are some uh who do that um I'll probably have to think about it and then I'll add it to the Chat can I can answer that one session AI does that as does Cuna yeah there you go answer Fe two two potential vendors session Ai and kahon was that the other one Kahuna Kahuna Kahuna perfect awesome um all right so um

my next question is is I'm going to start with you Vivian so Derek talked about companies using AI to create efficiencies and I think a lot of what we're using today is is in that Area what are some examples of efficiency that you've been able to achieve at at um with AI with GNC or at prior companies yeah um there's a a lot of different buckets and directions I feel like we could take this um you certainly what I talked about with the product content creation and the Val on it um building off of something

Amy actually mentioned uh we are using an AI partner for SE longtail pages so you think about GNC you have lots of different supplements protein powders creatines um but people are actually you know searching very specific use cases right what is the right protein for me as a woman who is an a athlete May ages for 50 something like that um and so we're actually able to spin up these um longtail pages that have some copy essentially they're a category page um and then we're now extending it to also have a similar tool Optimizer paid

Search titles descriptions for the shopping ads right and so that is saving a ton of time because of all of the um resources that would have had to go into creating landing pages figuring out what products to pull in um now able to do it you know really automated and jump on Trends a lot quicker yeah I can imagine how many just like roughly speaking how many category Pages have you spun up using AI for these different use cases so we're actually still in like early Days but even then we've got a few hundred you

think about products thousands of products out there um and so it is one of those almost like crawl walk run of getting all teams comfortable right we are in a regulated space and so we have to be careful what we're putting out there and so there are still eyes on everything um but really excited for the potential and um have been able to get cross functional Partners also excited about This yeah because I can imagine like that the potential use cases that people are using supplements for Endless and can fall in so many different categories

um Amy what are you seeing yeah I'll talk about two things um one is research and the other relates to creative imagery um as a marketer kind of you know as I've said many times and you've heard others say the the consumer is where the rubber meets the road so I'm always looking for an opportunity to Do research um and as everybody knows research is expensive and takes time I mean even if you're doing a relatively simple survey you're looking at a couple weeks more likely a month or two in order to get research done

so there's an early stage company called UNS survey un survey and they are using AI to do the screening do the creation of the questionnaire the moderation and the analytics and they're able to spin up uh a survey very quickly and talk to as Many as 10,000 uh consumers in one day which is just mindboggling the efficiency gains of that um they do a conversation graph so there's no hallucination um they're able to probe either within a question on a specific word or probe just on a question generally and very quickly um kind of compile

and synthesize the verbatims in a way that's really easy uh to to read and they're able to do this for personas and and Specific demos so the speed of that versus the alternative is what really um kind of blows my mind in terms of an opportunity for somebody in in marketing on the other side I mentioned early or a moment ago uh creative imagery as an opportunity this one I think probably has a little ways to go I do have a friend who works on a mattress brand and at her prior mattress brand um she

had done an entire uh group of creative assets um They don't really have seasons and mattresses but for her mattress brand completely Ai and it was absolutely shocking because you a you couldn't tell and B it looked like my my last vacation to mayorca um with the mattresses sitting they looking lovely so um I think that's that's coming um one of the areas that I do think is the biggest opportunities for companies is probably less sexy but important is kind of on the supply chain side when it Comes to demand forecasting and movement of inventory

so that's more of a you know that's an efficiency but that's more of a positive impact to the business when it comes to obsolete Goods yeah yeah so many there's so many use cases and so many ways to kind of gain efficiency from this um I want to talk about personalization um unless anyone else has anything that they want to chime in on on Efficiencies no okay then let's go to personalizations um so um ecta you know how talk about how AI is helping customers H hyper personalize the customer experience and where have you seen

the most success because you can there's a lot of aspects of the experience you can personalize but where have you seen the most success with AI Bas hyper personalization yeah I would say that you know personalization has been around Forever you you guys have been talking about on these webinars forever but I think the word really that's added is hyper personalization and um I I think the dream of personalization actually has more chances of reality with AI if you use it right so that's like the number one thing you have to have your data structured

in the right way and then how do you leverage that data to understand your consumer then how do you bring those consumer experiences to life Through AI whether it be search how are consumers searching how you know where are they clicking how do you you know upsell to you know really making it very very unique to their experience one of the things that we have at elf is a beauty Squad uh program which is 5 million Beauty Squad members this really allows us to intimately understand our consumers their Journeys and uh but it's it's also

those consumers who are not part of the program how do we get them Enrolled and how do we help them sort of see the benefits so there's so many different ways to leverage the capabilities of AI to deliver a very hyper personalized experience for your community and um that's that's something that I do feel is is one of the most powerful use cases that can see you can see through execution um but that's how sort of we're testing and learning with it uh at elf as well so you're using the AI to Help summarize what

this like Squad is doing and how they're interacting so you can better understand the different kind of Journeys that customers have is that is that a fair summary well Beauty Squad membership that that's first party data so really understanding sort of how our first party data uh how the beauty Squad members are engaging on the app how are they engaging on the site are they scanning receipts you know from Target and getting points there are they if They're an omni uh Channel Shopper there's so many different ways to sort of understand the interactions of the

consumer got it got it and I have a follow-up question um because an Sophie actually also had a question for you she she specifically called out that elf is seems to have a um your tick your Tik Tok shop seems to be very in well integrated as a channel and um her question was whether you're using AI to personalize a site experience for social Shoppers as well uh we're starting to take a look at it um right now we're focused on just our first party data we're testing something with ugc right now that takes in

some of the content from Tik Tok and then allowing us to see how we can personalize some of that but um that is something that's testing and learning not really full-fledged you know we're using it for hyper personalization well seems like the Experience is well received regardless so it's which is great um Vivian do you have any examples of how you're using AI for hyper personalization yeah um so I'd say it's similar to what ecta uh said I think that starts with insights and understanding in the audiences I think one of the big shifts is

that mostly based off of bandwidth um we used to always think about like personas or segments and you have you know three max Maybe five personas and then you have to build everything against it I think in this new world of using AI to build these like marketing automation Journeys we're really un unconstrained now right and so um be we're able to do a lot more thinking about micro segmentation and how do we show differently um but Bas off based off of how they interact with the brand what products um yes some like demographics or

you know what are their need States Coming in um so that really excited about um and then uh at BIR bees we were able to get to 100% of you know email SMS kind of touch points having some element of personalization and so I think that's like a place to start right A lot of it is product level uh recommendation so leveraging the tools youing the data for surfacing up what's the right product at the right time um but I am personally really excited to see where some of These like automation tools consumer Journey Tools

in particular can help to Stitch things into end for marketers so that we're able to do things at scale that used to have to get some mized and simplified into buckets yeah and I can imagine that that could be so complicated at GNC because depending if customers are trying to serve a health concern or trying to like deal with like a a wellness challenge there's all these different reasons why People might be looking for supplements and all of those seem to have probably very different Journeys um Vivian um Jennifer dwar from wisp she actually had

a question about the AI tool that you were using I think for the category pages that you described can you share what that is yeah sure um so for longtail Pages we use a tool called optival um and then earlier I spoke about the kind of digital shelf we use a Tool um called visit viit that kind of scores the imagery um before you you might set it Al awesome wonderful thank you um so one of the challenges of AI personalization and we saw this actually right in the survey results from today is getting all

the disperate data sources into one place it's actually the biggest challenge that I that I think this this community seems to have and um and without getting the Data unified it's hard to to fully take advantage of the AI tool so Derek you know how are businesses solving this problem and also what resources do they need to be able to tackle this kind of a challenge yeah great question um you know I think um to me there's the strategy really is about unifying your your data but maybe it's not literally unifying your data I think

the whole um data space has really evolved I'm certainly not you know um a technical Expert on it but I know that you know in a very large Legacy business um unifying multiple s silos of data can be very very expensive um and so that is a very different strategy than a smaller business um you know we used to talk a lot about data warehouses data Lakes now there's kind of new Concepts uh data lakehouses data mesh um so there's different strategies I think the key is that if your company has an AI task force

that should be basically Inextricably linked with the people who are defining and leading a data strategy um and really taking stock of like current state I would argue anyone in an e-commerce business your e-commerce Tech stack at the very least should be built off of a customer data platform and I would personally argue that most businesses if there's any aspect of data that you're gonna bring inhouse and own your data it would be the customer data right you might still have a lot of Other vendors for other data silos but I'm like you know there's

nothing more valuable than your first-party data in your business and all the things that you can do with it um in so many use cases of I don't know even in Market marketing like I dealt a lot with I had multiple platforms for messaging uh to customers email blast trigger emails SMS they all had different definitions of who the customer was so being able to then centralize um you know that view of Who the customer is and being able to create something like a next best action and say hey I need to send this type

of message with this type of offer and this type of product to ecta who I know only checks her phone she only likes to text whereas cristelle actually responds an email I would save a lot of bandwidth by making sure I'm actually targeting the right person in the place where they're most likely to respond and that's just one example um y Yep and I'm and I'm just predicting the audience questions because they seem to be consistent are there vendors you would recommend for data unification um that that would be good to look at um I'm

gonna hesitate to make Rec make recommendations because it will totally vary um and there's so many uh layers to um data there's you know the identification piece of who the customer is there's the actual warehousing of the Data there's processing and so the the there's numerous vendors but I think the key is um you know create a task force in your company that's focus on data strategy and Ai and make sure it's cross functional um and have has like your Tech Partners business partners and even people from um very importantly the people who deal with

inventory yep yep and would you say that this kind of the task force kind of be all the different stakeholders could This work be done by um does it have to be done by in-house teams or if people are in smaller organizations can Consultants also be helpful in terms of unifying the data yeah 100% graters yeah criselle anything you want to add there yeah I think um the one thing that I'll just kind of pile on uh from what Derek said is just the definitions right like I think the one thing we always forget is

um there's different definitions in different groups for Different things and that is like the biggest problem in unifying the data is because not everything is a vanilla implementation of Technology you've customized it probably to fit your needs but you know in this task group is really starting to define those common definitions so that everyone's speaking the same language um because as you start to add more and more data and you know more and more complexity like we're seeing this with what some of the work That we're doing for our customers is that's where stuff gets

hung up um that's where stuff can't get read and understood so you can't deliver those recommendations and those insights that make sense um and this is why sometimes when you use chat GPT and you put something in there and you get a bunch of gobbling G back right because you haven't you know you're not using the same definition as somebody else that's used you know that's asked that same Prompt so I think for me that's the big thing is is making sure everybody agrees on the same language and you're looking at the data holistically um

and not just in in silos and different departments yep yep absolutely um it you know garbage in garbage out if you don't have good good data 100% that's where AI falls down awesome let's talk about chat quickly for um because I think it's there's it's such an interesting thing And it's we've definitely seen some mixed results um so you know companies have have started to use AI in chat um there's obviously been some challenges whether it's like you know taking the chat down a path where the AI down a path where it hallucinates or having

it answer questions incorrectly I think there was an example in the travel industry where it was giving people refunds on their tickets when they shouldn't have been getting them you Know I guess my question for you Vivian are AI tools good enough to engage with customers directly yet and you know what kind of guardrails do AI based chat Bots need to be effective yeah um I think we've all as consumers experienced it right like it can be really frustrating to go through it's this AI chatbot that you hope is going to be more efficient than

you know picking up a phone or talking to someone and then you get stuck in like 20 Question Loop um because it won't get out of that so you know I think that's the challenge right now so I personally am a belief of leveraging AI to tap into the extensive knowledge base of you know internal resources data was like Q&A bank but then put almost like a human face or a human interaction in front of the actual consumer um because they think that the tools are still a little bit clunky right now um so as

an example of some directions that we're just kind Of considering right now with GNC um it is using AI to help build bundles or regiments for consumers so you interact with hey this is what I take right now what else would you suggest and we can train the you the um the logic to say okay don't go over you know this many grams of protein for this you know this person and then they can look at all of the ingredient SKS and you make some smart pairings together so um I think that's really interesting and

then Earlier there was a question about AI tools for offline experiences so you could imagine even extending what I just said and GNC has thousands of stores and we have store associates and coaches uh equipping them with a tool in their hand that is AI powered that can answer the questions that consumers have coming in right and you you just think about how powerful and how much more Rich that you know offline in-person experience can be that you know we're also then more Confident that or not you know giving out any kind of like questionable

you know suggestions for someone and so that that's the direction that I get excited about when I think about like the AI agents it's like how do we provide education tailor to your lifestyle and then you know strong product recommendations behind it yeah I I actually just had a great experience with like an AI I don't know if it's AI or just whatever but it was like I had Asked a question to my doctor on on one medical and they said here are some articles that we think are right relevant and then they said did

this answer your question no and then they connected me to a person it just was like they said we're going to try to give you a self-service answer but if it doesn't work you just got to respond and we'll connect you yeah yeah that's a great point because I think the basic customer service things like if you can Even you know save some hours or 10 20% of that then you're doing better as a company yeah exactly it's like if if 10% of customers can Self Service their answers that's just a little bit less time

from the for the humans to have to answer things that are obvious um awesome um let's you know we Amy kind of started to to to tease out the this whole thing about loyalty and discounts so I'd love to just go back to you Amy on this and how can AI help your loyalty Beyond discounting and how can you help match customers with the right offers at the right time yeah so this is really exciting in terms of impact um because most brands and retailers are you know offering the same percent off to everyone or

maybe differentiating some up by Channel or by what groups you might be opted into loyalty email for example a different offer on affiliate um a lot of folks are using cdps to identify people a lot of people have um ES p is plugged into some type of personalization engine the exciting thing about I saw session AI demoed very recently is that they're doing realtime behavioral Ai and you don't need any data and you don't need a CDP I don't know if that's true for Kahuna when I demoed Kahuna it actually took less clicks than the

session AI demo but the session a demo I saw only had five clicks and then they were able to give a price sensitivity score and segment you Into one of three buckets likely to buy on the fence unlikely to buy and then you can fire and trigger an offer to each group appropriately so think about the the points of margin that can be saved uh and maybe even improve if not maintain the same conversion rate so that's what I mean when I talk about you know the thing that's that's very exciting is impact to business

and impacts to um to to profitability with that Um I love that example because I think it brings up a good point of like there's there's you know as Z said we've always been talking about personalization for decades now um but I think that's a great example of contextualization so you may not know a single thing about that customer but based on certain user Behavior which is the vast majority of the people visiting your website you can start to assertain how serious or unserious they are even If you know nothing about them and tailor the

experience it was taking five clicks um you know the known universe might only be 10% so now you're able to attack the other 90% in a way that is going to drive results um it's real time as I said you don't need a CDP so that was you know very exciting and impactful Kahuna does a very similar thing I believe um and potentially with less clicks uh but I didn't get as deep with them as I did with session I I just Think there's a lot of potential in this particular area here yeah and I

think also like with loyalty the more you can get relevant productss in customers hands the more likely they're going to want to purchase and you don't have to rely on discounts I think especially you know as you have a large catalog some of it is about telling certain stories but some of it is just about making sure the customers see the things that are relevant for what they want Um yeah yeah I'll add one point to that is you know oftentimes we think about just um hyper personalization in the context of what are we doing

for the consumer but knowing sort of the insights from how consumers are interacting also helps you optimize how much content you're building and are you building the right content so there's also cost savings and efficiencies to be gained across the board because Imagine The Briefing process and how long it Takes to sort of get those you know assets briefed and so forth don't waste your your time on something that's not working right so it Al also I think helps the teams become smarter too yeah absolutely another example of thata similar to what you described there

is I've heard people use it to summarize data whether it's survey data or or customer reviews just like all these different efficiencies you can get that you know a junior person would do now Can be done with AI ex um we're we're almost coming up to the hour so we're running out of time I'm gonna just have one more question I'm going to turn it to you Derek um and actually it's it's perfect because um and Sophia also asked the same question is how do you um how do you build an Roi for an investment

so how do you build that business case when you're looking to invest in Ai and what kpis and metrics do you use to measure the success or failure of that kind of Technology investment or Pilot that you may have run yeah I mean I would say step one I would First Take stock um within your AI task force of all the things that are you're already doing with AI in your company because if part of the pressure with AI is just like my boss or the leadership team is telling me we need to do AI

if you can first show here all the the places where I'm already taking advantage of machine learning automation generative AI in my Business that might scratch a little bit of that itch um so you can really focus on what you need to but I think really um you know frankly it's about starting with that list and then really building that framework of what you're going to tackle next which could be either I'm gonna look for my biggest impact kpis and where I might have leakage in my funnel like horrible return rate or fraud rate or

a really low rate of converting one andone customers to Two-time purchasers whatever it is like really take stock of those big kpis and start measuring the impact if you improve them um even nominally or look at some of your most meaty processes internally where maybe you always have a lot of issues for example you know we had huge product cataloges we often had a lot of challenges with getting products up um in a complete way or you know perfectly complete you that maybe that's an area AI can help you tackle Which then frees up uh

you know time of merchants and site Merchants to do things that are more value added and I think if you just really think about um again going back to like AI is building blocks don't aim number one for perfect beautiful you know customized Journeys start with the building blocks of those things get those right um and even with some of the data pieces and vendors try to find ways to do some of that in-house or at least like create tests like Testing a vendor versus an in-house model and and some I think some people realize

like you can actually build some of these things in house you don't have to automatically go with a vendor in every case yeah there's some things if you don't have a lot of variants that you can do manually there's other things that AI can make a big impact on ecta any any additional thoughts on how to kind of build that business case yeah I Mean I think Derek summed it up really well but I would say that there's three types of rois that you have to sort of account for I I would say when the

buzz with chat GPD started people were throwing money at it testing and learning and just you know sort of building that awareness but now you actually have to prove is it a cost savings is it a revenue uplift is it a risk reduction and all three areas there's many use cases that you could be Actually delivering significant optimization for your um for your um you know organization so I would say look at the all your use cases and bucket them under these three because they they def there's definitely a lot of um opportunity there awesome

well thank you so much um Derek Amy ACTA Vivian cristelle thank you for joining us for sharing your insights today um I know this was way too short we could have gone on for for Another hour but we'll be back on December 11th with our cyberweek recap and Lessons Learned and advice for 2020 4 we look forward to seeing you all very very soon thanks everyone