August 15, 2024
NEW YORK – Prosper+ NYC wrapped last week at the Javits Center in Manhattan. The one-day event sparked a spirit of collaboration—not always an easy task among highly competitive online sellers.
Brent Wees, founder and creative strategist for Toronto-based idea.meet.plan fostered one aspect of the sharing ethos during a multi-hour Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hackathon. Prosper Show organizers sat down with Wees to learn a bit more about AI, such as; What can AI tools actually do for the business?
Prosper+ NYC: What’s the best-case scenario for the use of AI in online sales?
Wees: I personally geek out on the administrative side of AI tools and what they can do for me in terms of the back end. However, if online sellers are starting to look at AI tools and what they can do, they should start to look at what the tools can do in terms of data analysis. For example, you can take CSE [comparison shopping engine] files and throw them at AI channels like Chat GPT to generate business intelligence that may take a lot longer manually.
Ideally AI can help sellers to do repetitive tasks because the tools have been trained up in a specific way that works well for your business. Take time to dig into two or three things that can help the business—better images, better SEO, and better data analysis to make better business decisions. AI tools can do a lot of that work and save many hours to allow business owners to do the deep work about how they want to evolve the brand and how they want to evolve their market. That’s the really important stuff. Get more of the laborious day-to-day stuff out of the way using AI tools.
Prosper+ NYC: What about product imaging?
Wees: Product imaging is really important. What we showed in New York was the level and weight of heavy prompting for images needs to be well understood and then fleshed out. You can throw in an image of a light, such as a table lamp, but it’s going to be very AI-generated and cartoon-looking. However, there are prompts where you can add camera information, film information, lighting information. There’s almost nothing they can’t do.
Prosper+ NYC: What can go wrong when the tools are not properly used?
Wees: I always say that people should play with the tools because you really can’t break anything. You can’t mess anything up because you’re not tying it into some larger system. You’re just going into an AI environment and having a conversation with the bot—just talking back and forth. Where people can get it wrong is with what I call lazy prompting, where the less you write, the more AI has to hallucinate to build what you’re asking for.
Prosper+ NYC: How can you avoid that “hallucinating”?
Wees: The key is to be as detailed as possible while also being as simple as possible. Say you want to create an image of something—the more detail, simply put in, is going to give you exactly what you ask for. But if you’re vague, such as: ‘I need an email to decline something’—it’s going to write you a novel of flowery words. There’s also a lazy standard of AI imaging that you see when someone just prompts something quickly. It’s easy to detect.
Prosper+ NYC: How can you avoid that obvious AI look and feel?
Wees: No matter what you do with these tools, take it back out of the tool and re-humanize it. Put your own brand touch on it. Tweak a bit of copy here and there—maybe pulling that image you built into another piece of software to add to something else. When you’re talking to the machine, the more detailed you can be, the better the results are going to be.
Prosper+ NYC: How would you describe the evolution of AI?
Wees: AI has been a buzz word for the last two or three years, but the tools themselves have been around in various forms for a long time. The first chatbot came out of MIT in 1964. It’s just now that the general public is truly touching it, particularly with the emergence of ChatGPT. Some tools of course are in their infancy, but we’re in that next phase of platform maturation where more detailed language skills can be baked into these platforms by users, and the tools can do more than just write some email copy or create some pictures.
Prosper+ NYC: How much does it cost to use AI in the online selling business?
Wees: You can build robust technology of AI tools to underpin your entire business at a cost of sometimes under $1,000 per year. The level of flexibility in the tools is going to continue to evolve with core platforms like open AI, Claude, and specific Google and Microsoft tools. Smaller companies are also coming out of the woodwork. If you’re starting to really use these and dive into them, you can find some well-built products to help run your business.
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