The True Power of ChatGPT in Digital Commerce: Virtual Shopping Assistants
We are on the path to an AI-augmented commerce experience, and I look forward to seeing merchants embrace the trend, innovate, and create the next generation of shopping experiences.
ChatGPT made a big splash when it was released in November 2022, and I’ve been using it for various tasks ever since. As someone in the digital commerce industry, I’ve been curious about how ChatGPT could be used in this space. With the recent release of the ChatGPT API, which allows businesses and apps to integrate ChatGPT’s capabilities into their own offerings, I’ve been wondering about potential use cases that could disrupt the digital commerce space.
One potential use case that I believe could be a game-changer is a virtual shopping assistant powered by ChatGPT. Why? I’ll elaborate soon.
Now, firstly what ChatGPT won’t disrupt?
While there are several articles discussing ChatGPT’s use cases in the eCommerce space, many of them have missed the mark. The most common use case cited is content creation. Although ChatGPT is capable of generating various forms of content, such as blog posts, product descriptions, and social media ads/posts, this is not its core capability. Products such as Jasper.ai and copy.ai have been built specifically for these use cases using GPT-3. ChatGPT is not designed to disrupt that space.
Now that GPT-3 has been mentioned, it is important to distinguish between GPT-3 and ChatGPT in order to comprehend the distinctive core capabilities of ChatGPT. Let’s see how ChatGPT explains this:
As you can see, ChatGPT is an application of the GPT-3 model. Its key capabilities and uniqueness, compared to other AI out there, lie in its ability to comprehend natural language, as well as to understand and retain the context of a conversation. Therefore, I believe that the primary use case for ChatGPT in the digital commerce space should be related to conversational interfaces, rather than merely content generation.
What about customer service?
The second use case that is often mentioned for ChatGPT is customer service. This application makes perfect sense, given the core capabilities of ChatGPT that we discussed earlier. Chatbots are commonly used nowadays for customer service, which significantly improves efficiency but can also often lead to a frustrating customer experience. In the past, chatbots were built using pattern matching, which means that if the bot did not recognise a particular keyword in the customer’s inquiry, it would not understand what the customer wanted. However, with the integration of ChatGPT, service apps and chatbots can better comprehend inquiries and provide more human-friendly responses to customers.
I believe there is a significant opportunity for companies like Gorgias, Zendesk to enhance their customer service apps and chatbots by leveraging the ChatGPT API. While this development is undoubtedly exciting, I view it as more of an evolution than a revolution.
The real revolution
A ChatGPT-powered virtual shopping assistant, on the other hand, has the potential to truly disrupt and reimagine the shopping experience.
Imagine walking into a luxury fashion brand store, and being greeted by a sales assistant who already knows your style preference and what you bought last month. They make small talk and introduce the latest arrivals that might interest you. This is a standard physical store experience yet to be replicated online in a scalable way.
This is where ChatGPT comes in. A ChatGPT-powered virtual shopping assistant would have all the knowledge of a retailer’s products and service offerings, as well as a customer’s shopping preferences through their order history and other data. It could have fluent conversations with customers, answering their queries and proactively recommending products they may like. Customers could even make purchases purely by conversing with the shopping assistant, much like in-store shopping. This closely mirrors the in-store shopping experience we discussed earlier. Instead of having to browse the store, your sales assistant would bring the products you like directly to you. See below for an example conversation with a grocery store virtual shopping assistant I made up.
Some companies, such as Shopify, have already started investing in this area. Shopify’s Shop app now has a new shopping assistant powered by ChatGPT. I’ve tried the app myself. While the recommendation engine needs improvement, the conversation was smooth, making it a promising start.
I believe we’ll see more and more shopping assistant-style apps and services in the next year or two, especially in areas where there’s a significant need for product, service, and industry knowledge or where there’s a large catalog of products. Enterprise-level automobile shops, grocery stores, online marketplaces, and vertical retail aggregators will likely be the first to invest in and adopt this technology, followed by mid-market and smaller retailers and brands.
What if we put a voice to it?
By combining the virtual assistant with voice recognition technology, we could achieve a true conversation-style shopping experience. This would expedite the adoption of voice commerce. Going forward, I hope to see more chat and conversation-based interfaces, similar to the Amazon or YouTube voice input interface, on shopping sites and apps. Additionally, I anticipate the availability of more shopping-related apps on smart speakers.
And a face, too?
In physical stores, the combination of a virtual shopping assistant with facial recognition technology could result in an AI-powered shopping assistant that recognises you and your shopping preferences. This assistant could provide personalised responses to your inquiries and make proactive shopping suggestions tailored to your preferences, all within the store, with little to no manual input required from you.
The AI-augmented commerce experience is coming
The possibilities for ChatGPT-powered virtual shopping assistants are endless. While some may find the idea a little scary, all the technologies are available right now. We are on the path to an AI-augmented commerce experience, and I look forward to seeing merchants embrace the trend, innovate, and create the next generation of shopping experiences.
Overall, I believe that virtual shopping assistants powered by ChatGPT have the greatest potential to disrupt and revolutionise the shopping experience. With the ChatGPT API now available, I can’t wait to see what creative solutions developers and businesses will come up with to take advantage of ChatGPT’s unique capabilities and transform the digital commerce space.
