Artificial Intelligence CoPilot is The New SaaS Term of Art
Commerce platforms everywhere are getting an AI "glow-up". And who would blame them? You can't walk out of your house and not hear someone talking about an AI, GPT, LLM, or whatever new crazy acronym is out there.
Simply put, the hype is almost unbearable.
AI has been here in various forms as a term of art in computing since 1956. It's just outside of university, government, and defense settings didn't see it for a very long time. The first adopters in the last 20 years were financial services due to fraud and other types of widespread financial applications.
Skipping forward to the post-ChatGPT-era (like 5 minutes ago), the timeline in terms of the eCommerce platforms follows:
* February 22, 2023: Shopware launches an AI Assistant for product descriptions.
* April 20, 2023: Shopify launches "Magic", an AI-driven description-writer.
* May 4, 2023: Buried in Tobi's announcement about layoffs, Tobi posits that one of the big new focuses of Shopify will be a "Copilot for Entrepeneurship," as AI offers a way to radically simplify life for entrepreneurs.
* May 16, 2023: Shopify released Email Subject Lines + Send Times Powered by AI.
* May 25, 2023: Shopware launches an "AI Copilot" and a handful of AI-related features like translation, keywords, review summary, etc.
* June 1, 2023: Shopify released AI-powered Inbox Message responses.
* June 7, 2023: Salesforce unveils CommerceGPT (?!) and MarketingGPT to help power its platform. [I guess OpenAI doesn't have the trademark yet??]
Look, every platform can take advantage of AI, but I think you will be able to tell over the next year... if there is an input field anywhere, AI will be involved. If there is an image to be uploaded, AI will be able to generate it. If there is metadata to be created, AI will be there. If there is a response to be given, AI will help generate and analyze the response sentiment. If segments are to be created, AI will suggest some automatically based on your traffic and data. If any decision can be made by a human or a human-built rule, it will be either made or assisted by AI.
It's safe to say that Shopware and Salesforce and Shopify have created stakes in the ground around AI, but others are coming and many SaaS players have been forming group in the past 10 years on this, but with the demise of crypto and DTC/eCommerce as the dominant funding recipient of venture capital.... AI has replaced it all. And so the hype cycle will be outsized.
And look, it will be helpful. Almost all of it. If you need something accelerated or optimized, AI will be there.
However, if you have a broken retail business model, AI will not help you. For that, you are on your own.
About the only thing that will not contain AI is Google GA4 because it is straight terrible. LOL.
