The New Assistants

If the pandemic-era rise in online and omnichannel shopping accelerated the digital transformation of the retail industry, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies could put that transformation into overdrive. Today’s businesses are embracing the vast potential of AI—and personalization and awards retailers are already reaping the rewards. Among small businesses that have adopted AI, 95% say their investment in AI has largely reduced their need to hire more marketing people, according to a 2022 survey of over 400 small businesses in Canada and the U.S.

The New Assistants

Artificial intelligence might upend work in the industry, with shops already gaining major efficiencies.

By: Novid Parsi

(Originally printed in the July/August 2023 issue of Insights.)

“In retail, AI has grown by leaps and bounds in the past three years,” says Venkatesh Shankar, professor of marketing and e-commerce and director of research at the Center for Retailing Studies, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University.

Of the myriad AI technologies that retailers are now leveraging—from personalizing the shopping experience to automating order fulfillment to enabling no-code or low-code websites—there’s one tech that awards and personalization retailers say could be a game-changer for their industry: generative AI, or systems that can generate text and images in response to a user’s prompts.

Retailers are harnessing generative AI to create drafts of product descriptions, product designs and social media content. “Generative AI like ChatGPT has allowed for first-draft creation, so content creation has become easier,” Shankar says. As a result, retailers can avoid spending hours on creating content themselves or hiring others to do it.

And generative AI tools, at least for now, come with a significant perk: They cost little to nothing. “Retailers don’t have to invest a lot in these technologies. Many come at a fairly low cost,” Shankar says.

David Takes, owner of Expressions Engraved in St. Joseph, Missouri, has used free tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help create website copy and so far hasn’t spent a penny on generative AI.

In recent months, some awards and personalization retailers have begun exploring the possibilities of generative AI. Already, these retailers say, the technology has been transformative.

Saving Time and Money

FirePoint Creations in Noblesville, Indiana, recently revamped its website and added about 60 new products, all of which needed new descriptions. In the past, business manager Mark Conde says he would have written all the descriptions himself, which would have taken several days. With ChatGPT, he got that work done in several hours. Using the free version of ChatGPT, he entered one or two sentences about each product and asked the tool to write a product description. Within seconds, ChatGPT generated three or four paragraphs.

For example, Conde asked ChatGPT to write a description of a trophy and gave it some keywords—such as pinewood derby trophy, seven inches tall, shape of a car, made out of resin, and gold and black colors. ChatGPT quickly generated a well-written, three-paragraph description. “It includes all the flowery words, but the best part is that it makes sense, and it’s spot-on,” Conde says.

A sample of Mile High's AI-assisted social media posts

At Mile High Laser Engraving in Denver, owner Mike Westbrook also uses ChatGPT to create product descriptions. Additionally, Westbrook uses a browser extension called AIPRM to improve his site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and attract more web traffic. For instance, when he asks ChatGPT to write a product description of 300 to 500 words, AIPRM suggests SEO-friendly language.

Pre-AI, Westbrook spent a lot of time and thought coming up with different descriptions for very similar products—like a stainless steel tumbler that comes in various colors. Now, ChatGPT instantly provides differently worded descriptions for what’s fundamentally the same product. “It makes it easier to be creative in writing product descriptions when you have 20 of the same thing,” Westbrook says.

Westbrook also uses ChatGPT to write social media posts. For example, to help educate customers on the value of corporate awards, he simply asked ChatGPT to write a blog post on that topic. “It gave me five or six pretty strong paragraphs on why corporate awards are valuable—for example, they motivate employees,” Westbrook says. “I’d have a hard time coming up with five or six things, but within 30 seconds, ChatGPT had a full article ready to go.”

As another use, Westbrook asked ChatGPT to write 35 educational bullet points on laser engraving. He then used an AI tool called Canva Pro (for which he pays about $13 per month) to turn the ChatGPT-generated content into 35 Instagram posts. In the past, the process of creating all that content would have taken a couple of hours. With AI, Westbrook did it all in just about five minutes.

At Expressions Engraved, Takes has been using ChatGPT to provide inspiration for website copy, including product descriptions, blog posts and award copy. “This tool has been a time saver in that it assists and speeds up the creative process,” Takes says.

AI-generated products from Expressions Engraved

Worth a Thousand Words

Awards and personalization retailers are also using AI to generate images. AI technology, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, can use text descriptions to create realistic images and art. Conde has begun using this technology to create images for his website—such as a family playing soccer. Instead of having to spend hours searching stock photography websites for just the right image, the tool quickly creates it.
Westbrook uses Canva Pro to also design presentations. Last year, he spent 15 hours creating a presentation with about 30 slides. Now, he can use Canva’s Magic Write to create a similar presentation in about an hour and a half. He enters the topic and the number of bullet points he wants, and the program creates the content. “And I have something that no one knows was AI generated,” he says. He’s also explored DALL-E 2 and Picsart to create custom background imagery for products on his website.

When he used to create award designs without AI, Takes would start with the customer’s vision and then hand-draw a rough concept on a sketch pad. He would then go back and forth with the customer to finalize the design concept, before creating a digital rendering. “I’ve always had to get creative based on vague information from the customer,” Takes says.

Now, AI tools Artbreeder and Midjourney don’t just quickly provide Takes with options, but they also present them in a fully digital format. “It’s like bypassing the old sketching phase. All I do is enter some specific design element prompts into the AI program, and it spits out the images,” Takes says. The programs have suggested design ideas that Takes hadn’t considered, and the images can be easily modified. “AI saves time and takes creativity to an almost infinite level,” he says.

Canva Pro screen capture

The How-tos and How-not-tos

Tech skeptics might reasonably ask: How difficult and time-consuming is it to learn generative AI?

Not at all, retailers say. “It’s so simple it’s scary,” Conde says. “I found the free version of ChatGPT, and within 15 minutes I was able to use it to create real product descriptions.”

Takes watched YouTube videos to learn how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools, then spent some time playing with the tools and learning how to enter prompts that got the results he wanted. “It’s not overwhelming at all,” Takes says. “It’s so much easier than it appears on the surface, and it’s a huge opportunity that needs to become a growing part of our day-to-day businesses.”

Still, with generative AI, there’s one pro tip that business should know: The better the input, the better the output. More detailed, specific prompts yield stronger results. “I might spend a little more time putting words into the prompt to get longer and better-written descriptions,” Westbrook says. “Learning how to prompt it better to get better results—that’s the real key to generative AI.”

Users should also be aware that generative AI can produce incorrect information. “ChatGPT can give wrong answers or suggestions, and it can be biased and in some cases insensitive, so retailers have to be careful when using these tools,” Shankar says. “They have to understand it’s not always reliable. So they should look at each and every response they get and then use their own judgment to modify it, rather than completely leaving it to these tools.”

OpenAI says as much itself: “ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. It has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.”

And with image creation, Takes adds a note of caution: “Just because AI created a design doesn’t mean it’s not copyrighted.”

For their purposes, however, awards and personalization retailers say any AI-generated inaccuracies have been minimal and easily fixable. “ChatGPT isn’t 100% right, so you have to be careful, but it does such a good job that I’m able to tweak the product description so it’s friendly for customers and for online,” Conde says. “It’s more than 95% correct as is, so the tweaking is minimal.”

“You do have to read the content that AI produces, for sure,” Westbrook says. He finds AI-generated blog posts, especially longer posts, might have a handful of words that “didn’t make sense, so you have to change a few words, but that’s rare. The majority of the time for us, it’s been extremely accurate.”

Standard Practice

Retailers who are now exploring generative AI say the future is here. Westbrook started using generative AI just this year—and already he considers it “a big game-changer for us,” he says.

Instead of hiring or outsourcing to content creators or marketers—or taking time they don’t have to create content themselves—shop owners can leverage generative AI to do the content work in a fraction of the time. “There is no doubt ChatGPT will be the standard practice for writing product descriptions,” says Conde, who’s considering signing up for the paid version, ChatGPT Plus, which provides better and faster access to the service for $20
a month.

“A lot of people get it into their heads that artificial intelligence is evil, and it’s going to take over the world,” Conde says. “This isn’t like Skynet from ‘The Terminator.’” Conde compares the potential impact of generative AI at this moment to the rise of ecommerce at the start of the pandemic. “The more that businesspeople embrace the technology, the better their lives are going to be. And people who don’t embrace this technology will get left in the dust.”

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