This Episode: Essential AI Tools For Retailers
AI has become an invaluable tool for busy retailers, and it’s only getting better! In this episode of Real Retail TV, I’m sharing a highlight from last year’s Retail Success Summit, showcasing some of the top ways AI is being used by retailers today. AI has advanced even further since then, and we’re thrilled to be featuring a dedicated panel at this year’s Summit to dive deeper into how entrepreneurs can leverage this game-changing technology.
Plus, right now, you can save $500 on your registration for the Retail Success Summit if you sign up by June 28th! I truly believe this year’s event is going to be the best yet. We’ve got amazing new speakers, fantastic panels, and of course, the fun and community that make every WhizBang! event special. Don’t miss out, register today, and we’ll see you in Grand Rapids on July 29th and 30th!
– Susan
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Hey. It’s Susan Negen here, and welcome to this episode of Real Retail TV.
It’s gonna be a sneak peek into the kind of things that you might be learning at the Retail Success Summit this year, twenty twenty four. This is actually a workshop we did last year at the summit on artificial intelligence.
And the exciting thing is that this year at the summit, we’ve got even more content, more great information on artificial intelligence, and how you can use it in your retail business.
We’re we’re gonna have a whole panel of people talking about this topic.
Good news. We’ve got a special deal on the retail success summit right now through the June twenty eighth, almost to the end of the month, through Friday, June twenty eighth, you can get five hundred dollars off your registration.
It’s a fantastic deal. So clear your calendars, book your flights, buy your tickets, and I’m going to see you at the Retail Success Summit. Now, let’s take a look at the event from last year.
Best AI tools for retailers and how to use them, but it kind of also generally just talking about what it is, what it what it means, how it’s gonna impact us. We’ve our you know, everybody’s heard lots and lots about it, but specifically how it’s gonna affect some of us as retailers. So, let’s just start with this question, which is what exactly is AI? So, I had some ideas about what I thought it was. So I I did some research because I’m a very high fact finder. And, what I found was pretty interesting, is that it actually the very beginnings of actual concrete development for AI started in nineteen fifty six.
Who’d have thought that. Right? At a conference in Dartmouth. It actually started earlier during World War two, the very beginnings of it. But nineteen fifty six at a conference in dart at Dartmouth, University, that’s where the term artificial intelligence, which is what AI stands for, was first coined.
And here are two definitions that I found that I thought were particularly interesting.
This idea of the simulation of human intelligence, By the way, definitely not human intelligence, but the simulation of human intelligence.
Expert systems, natural language. This is one of the hallmarks of artificial intelligence, natural language, speech recognition, and machine vision.
And I’m gonna give you some examples of all of those things today.
The other, so quick quiz quick question. How afraid right now do you feel about artificial intelligence?
How do you feel about it right now? We’ve got three choices, scary, meh, or love it.
So how how are you guys feeling about it? Kinda even. Very interesting. Very interesting.
Right? So it can feel scary, you know, and there’s a lot of things to love about it. So we’ll hopefully, we’ll we’ll talk about some of those things today. Cool. Love it is winning. Perfect.
Awesome.
Okay.
So this is another, definition, and I like this one because, it talks about more what it does, like artificial intelligence allows machines to perceive their environment, solve problems, which computers do, but AI does in a different way, and act to achieve a specific goal. So this so these are these are very different, definitions, but they relate. Right?
So, I want you to know that AI is already everywhere.
It’s everywhere.
It’s even in your living room.
Did you guys know that Roomba is artificial intelligence?
It perceives its environment and solves a problem, which is how to clean your floor most efficiently, and it remembers its patterns.
It’s a pattern developing machine. It’s artificial intelligence.
Self driving cars.
Tesla has a self driving car. Artificial intelligence. We got to ride in our friend’s, Tesla, one of the very first ones that came off the off the line. And he just sat there with his arms folded and the car drove itself down the highway. It was absolutely amazing.
Alexa is artificial intelligence.
Everybody’s favorite, Siri.
Not so intelligent, artificial intelligence.
It’s still a work in progress. Right?
It’s everywhere. Google, your search bar. When that list comes up to give you suggestions and ideas for the letters that you’re putting in there, that’s artificial intelligence.
And if Google Maps ever reroutes you because there is an accident or a slowdown up ahead, that’s all using AI technology.
Two years ago at the Retail Success Summit, we introduced this, system, Jasper AI.
That’s artificial intelligence. It’s a writing system.
And, Cindy, where are you?
Our very own Cindy Wells has created her very own AI robot for her store. She had a hard time finding, employees. She lives in a really tiny town in New Mexico, so she developed Sage.
And Sage can interact with her customers and answer questions like, where’s the dog food? Or my dog food has an allergy to wheat, which products might be best?
So she’s developed a a robot called Sage, and that’s her daughter Maya who’s here. Maya’s like, oh, man. Did you have to say that?
So it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere all around us and has been for a really long time since nineteen fifty six. So why why now? Why in the last, I don’t know, three, four, five months, is it like this huge, massive new thing? Feels new. Right? Feels bigger or something.
Well, I think there’s two reasons, and the first is that the the newest released AI has become much, much, much better, better than Siri, at natural language.
Both understanding your natural language and feeding back natural language to you. It’s generative.
It can create natural language in a new and different way.
So it’s basically chat GPT that was developed by OpenAI.
That’s really what’s come out that’s brand new, that’s so different, and so much more developed than Siri or Alexa or any of these other technologies.
And also, I think one of the things that’s new about this particular product and Jasper and some of the products like that is that you get to interact, directly with the AI.
So with Roomba or, your Tesla self driving car or some of those things, you can see that the AI is integrated into the product.
And you, like, you deal with the product, not directly with that artificial intelligence.
And I think that’s honestly how we’re gonna continue to see it grow and be used mostly in retail. It’s gonna be integrated into your point of sale system. It’s gonna be integrated into your email programs.
But ChatGPT is an amazing piece of technology that you can interact with directly, and it can do amazing things.
Here are just a few of the ideas that you might take away that you could use chat GPT for.
So if you wanted to create a video script, hey, chat GPT. Write me a video script for this and again take the picture feel free but you will get these slides. Go ahead. It’s totally fine.
You can use it to create customer role plays.
Hey, pretend you’re an angry customer who wants to return something and you give them the scenario, and they will write back a script like a play so that you can role play with your employees.
Come up with fifty headlines for whatever article or blog post or whatever subject lines. Give me ten subject lines for this email, and you can put the text of the email, and it’ll create ten sub declines that you can pick from.
So it can do a ton of amazing, amazing things.
It can create a trivia game for you that you could use as a special event in your store.
So chat GPT has got really unlimited possibilities.
And the thing is, the stuff that comes back is pretty, pretty cool. But in order to get cool stuff out of it, you have to put cool stuff into it. So, really, it’s all about that prompt, prompt, prompt.
So the prompt is what you ask it.
And like I said, this natural language piece is what’s really new and cool about the latest generation of AI. So you can talk to chat quote talk type, or there there is speech recognition. You can talk to chat GPT exactly the same way that you might talk to an intern, a college intern, for example. And honestly, you’re gonna get the best response from CHAT GPT if you do just that. Pretend like you’re talking to a college intern, somebody, and say, hey.
You know, do this thing in this way using these materials, and I’ll give you some examples of prompts in just a minute.
So this is what chat GPT looks like.
I love that it gives you some examples, tells you what it is capable of, and also warns you about what it’s not good at.
So this is really good. But at the bottom there, where it says send a message, that’s where you’re gonna type in your prompt.
Okay? So here’s an example that I did for you.
So this is exactly I did not change anything about what I got from Chad GPT. So I typed in the prompt, come up with ten headlines for an article about the best way to trim a dog’s nails without hurting the dog or making the pet owner crazy. Right? That’s exactly how you might say it to an intern. Hey. Come up with ten article ten ten headlights.
And this is what they came up with. Painless pause, mastering the art of trimming your dog’s nails stress free. My personal favorite, zen and the art of dog nail trimming.
Achieving harmony for you and your dog.
Right? So, honestly, guys, less than five seconds.
Those are all really pretty good headlines.
There’s not a terrible one up there.
Certainly, there’s a headline up there that you could take and modify, add a word, adapt that would make a really, really awesome headline for a blog post.
Right? So that’s one of the things that’s really important to understand about all of these artificial, especially the generative where they generate responses for you.
They’re not gonna be perfect.
You may have to modify, adapt, edit, adjust, but it’s way faster than trying to come up with ten headlines yourself.
Right? It’s so much easier to just modify, add a few words, put your store name in there, and away you go. Right? So these this this was super awesome. So this is a pretty easy one. So I decided to give it a little bit harder task.
I asked it to write about a three hundred word bio. So this is this is the exact prompt I put in.
Write a bio about Lisa Roberts, the owner of Rock Paper Scissors, a gift store in Ann Arbor, Michigan in a humorous and sassy style, because that’s Lisa’s store persona.
She has a humorous and sassy gift store.
So this is what it came out with. Oh, you’re in for a treat, darling. Let me introduce you to the one and only Lisa Roberts, the fabulous and fearless owner of Rock Paper Scissors in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Brace yourself for a gal filled with sass, wit, and a whole lot of sparkle.
And if you know Lisa, did it hit it on the nose? Yeah. It totally did.
Right? But remember what I said, it’s all about that prompt, prompt, prompt?
Sassy and humorous style got me the good start. Now it’s not perfect. It would need editing. It needs massaging.
Right?
But it was like seven paragraphs that were about Lisa and her store. It was amazing.
They knew it was a stationary store. I did not write stationary in the prompt that she that she carried stationary. How did it know?
Because it went out to the web and read her entire website, and in, like, literally thirty seconds generated this bio.
So I’m like, alright. Well, how good is it really?
So I changed the prompt, and I said I put the exact the the first part was exactly the same, but I changed and I asked for a formal and academic style.
And I got back, Lisa Roberts is a distinguished entrepreneur and proprietor of the esteemed rock, paper, scissors. Right?
Esteemed.
Nestled within the vibrant city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, with an unwavering dedication. You see how different it is?
Like, honestly, if you go through and start to analyze the the the, the content is very similar, but the style is completely different.
So you can put in friendly, casual, whimsical, sassy, formal, expert, all those things that we talked about yesterday, all of those things that are your competitive advantages, if you can feed that into chat d GPT when you are creating these pieces of content, you’re gonna get a really awesome head start on anything you wanna create. Alright. Well, there you go. I hope you loved those really actionable tactical ideas on how you can use AI in your business.
But here’s what I want you to know is that this year at the summit, in twenty twenty four, we’re gonna go even deeper. We have a whole panel of people talking about AI, artificial intelligence, and all the different ways that you can start to use it in your retail business to really grow and expand. So I wanna see you at the summit this year. It is in July on the twenty ninth and the thirtieth of July, and through this Friday, the twenty eighth of June.
I’m gonna get these dates right. The twenty eighth of June, June, we have a special deal for you. It’s the summit ticket prices are half price. Save five hundred bucks.
So go ahead, get your tickets right now. It’s going to be an amazing event. We’re really excited. Get your tickets now.
Book your flights. Get your MapQuest or whatever, your Google Maps ready to go for your trip, whatever you need to do, and I wanna see you at at the summit this year.