Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Alright. 12 we lost cast. So I think I might be kicking off as a moderator. Michael. just to get things going. Wanted to say welcome to everybody who is here today.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I'm really happy to have you join us in a conversation that I am pretty excited about personally. Pretty engaged in topically, and I think also one of those big things that is really E, influencing the direction of where we're headed. Especially in a D to C and e-commerce sort of of view.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And so this conversation today we're really trying to keep pretty casual again. We we called out. So there is the Q&A function at the bottom of the zoom webinars. There's also the chat tool. Feel free to post up any questions that you have
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: again, we're gonna try to pretty casual and just talk through some of the different things around AI, and how we're using it. some ways that we would recommend D to C brands, use it.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and really look for things that you could implement in a timely fashion. We are obviously coming up to some pretty key selling season for a lot of different brands. And so we don't want to. Say, like, Hey, build your own AI large language model. Be ready by 2025. We wanna talk about things that maybe are a little bit more practical. And you can roll out in the next couple of weeks as part of your work flows, or processes or suite of tools
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: in such a way that it really is going to have a meaningful impact on on you this quarter for so
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: gonna turn back to Cass. Welcome back Cass. I think you're with us now. Although you're very still. So maybe you are.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: losing connection somehow, just on the morning of the webinar Kas, can you hear us.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Oh, there she goes again! Alright! Well, I will get to play cast. She's gonna miss out on her first. What? Webinar moderating opportunity!
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Michael! Why don't I go to you? And if you could give a quick introduction on you and your role, and what it is that you do, and what it is that site does and how that's relevant to our conversation today. It'd be great.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: sure. So hi! Everyone good to be here, obviously excited to to pass of the conversation. I am the the senior director of global pre-sales. Sites site, visual conception, Limited. And basically site offers the the leading visual AI platform for retail. We have a product discovery platform that really, I suppose you would divide into 2 parts. Firstly, there's sort of the the impact on the shopper experience
Michael Isaacson - Syte: where we're basically empowering shoppers to instantly find things that they they want. They love. They're inspired by through. Yeah, visual product discovery journeys that really are driving conversion. So
Michael Isaacson - Syte: we do all of that. And then also we have sort of the other part which is the retail operations, the back office, where we provide solutions for product tagging and and merchandising, so on your analysts and optimization. And the reason that obviously this conversation, so interesting for me is because what? How we do all of this, as I say, is visual. AI. You know, we're very much in this this space. So it's gonna be really interesting for me to obviously see how this conversation progresses. And I'm looking forward to it
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: awesome. And I'll handle Intro for coalition and myself.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: My name is Jordan Brandon. I'm president and co-founder of coalition technologies. Depending on you know the how we're working on a particular day. We like to talk about ourselves as a technology led marketing agency focused on e-commerce or a marketing led technology agency focused on e-commerce. So a little bit of an inversion there.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I've been with the company since our founding in 2,009. My Internet is super unstable, of course.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and so I'm gonna
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: go ahead and keep you on mute there. Sorry, Kathy, on a little bit of a delay. But so we've been around for 14 years we mainly work with a well established, small and mid sized businesses in the e-commerce space big focus on a D to C, and today, we are really evaluating and utilizing AI, and as many practical ways as we possibly can.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: As an agency where really, our value is the service that we can bring to the to the table. We really see AI as a big part of how we're going to provide that value and increase that value. for our clients. And so it's a big, active area of testing. We have some things that we really have a perspective on and a belief and an opinion on today. But again, ho! Glad to have the chance to share that in this conversation.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Maybe I want to kick over to you, Michael, and just sort of as a kind of a a starting question. Any particular AI tools that you or your team are personally using just in terms of day to day workflow and experience that, you know could be relevant to just sort of someone who is in and is gonna have to answer emails and communicate and do some other things, just as part of the daily workflow. I think that your team was able to come up with that. You would recommend.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, I think the the classic ones. Really, you know, we obviously within the sales org of of the company sending out a lot of emails, making a lot of contact, cold calling people and anything that can kind of
Michael Isaacson - Syte: prepare emails, even though you may want to obviously still check them before you send them anything that can help you with your dialogue with your communication that can really take all of the sort of mundane tasks and move them to one side, I think, is definitely something that we find to be of benefit for us in sort of our daily working lives.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So there is that kind of thing. And then also, when you think in terms of obviously again talking sales, the pipeline, looking to, you know, analyzing what's going on these are the kind of areas that already. You know, there are tools out there that can provide benefit. And even if you just think in terms of salesforce and what they do with, you know, various components, such as Einstein. There's a lot going on. And I think, obviously depending on the role that a person has.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: There is definitely, you know, gonna they're gonna be able to find something that already can save them a lot of time and effort. We certainly have done, you know.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I think one of my favorite tips. That I heard early, and I think that's been really helpful for me.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I think partially because I am so
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: curious on one hand, you know. Feel like I. You know there is. There's something new happening. And I really wanna make sure I understand it and grasp it, and can kind of digest what's going on. And then, on the other hand, is some way sort of feels a little threatening. Right? You know, there's sort of this massive, you know, conversation happening around, you know, which jobs exist in a post AI world.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And so II think part of what we've been focusing on is really sort of looking at the AI tools that already exist in our tech stacks. And that was that tip that I was referring to earlier, where most of us have tools that are are already being added to software as we use on a regular basis.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and those are often some really sort of low-hanging fruit for us in terms of what we can start to access and use and test.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: A coalition is a Google Workspace organization and Google's rolled out barred products, or the barred AI product suite to interact with things like Google sheets and Google Docs and Gmail and all those other things we love.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And so you can now begin to utilize and a traverse different communication mediums in Google with Bard as as an example. A Zoom, for instance, also has a AI summary for a a different meetings. Note taking things like that.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And so that's really one of the best tips that I would offer from like a low, hanging starting point. Look at the software you're using already. Whether this is part of your e-commerce store, or part of your customer service suite, or part of your sales suite, and do a check, you know. Hey, what is the AI option or offering here is this something that we can utilize today? And I'm finding that to be really, really helpful?
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you start off with, as you say, those low hanging fruits, the
Michael Isaacson - Syte: where you already have the software, you actually just tapping into the new functionalities. Number one, you can then see if it is bringing any benefit to you and potentially then move on to something that's a bit more focused, a bit more customized, and maybe a bit more, if you like, sort of just specific to a to a specific requirement. So couldn't agree more really. Yeah.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I think one of the early questions that I'd had come in actually, just in in some of the responses we had to. The sign ups was just sort of a basic building blocks. Question
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: of sort of what's happening
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: with ais and sort of how does that help kind of inform what ais we might use, Michael? Maybe you could talk you know, kind of immediately about
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: kind of how site works and sort of what is happening behind the scenes. So you know. We can talk certainly more about what is happening, you know, above boards, where everybody's going to see and be able to utilize that. But what is sort of as the background process is that are really driving the the success for people who are using site. Maybe if you could.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: you know, phrase them in somewhat of a generic way, that people might be able to sort of connect the dots between things like Chat Gvt, or or ideas like that. So does that is that clear?
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, I think so. I'll start with just a very quick story about how the company started, just to really give the sort of context, which is one of the Co. Founders, was was in London, walking down the street, saw a woman wearing a lovely red dress, and was like, I want to buy that dress.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: How do I do it?
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So it was from there that basically the whole kind of story came from. And initially, it was all about having an image, and how you can use that to find products that you want to shop.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So in terms of visual AI, basically, what we do is is all you know.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: as I guess you could say, AI is, it's about creating algorithms.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: collecting data, training it, having a dataset and then training the model to do whatever it is you want it to do so. In our case, what we're looking to do is leverage images that shoppers bring all images, product images that are already on the the platform, the ecommerce platform in the shop.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: and let you know
Michael Isaacson - Syte: the visual component drive, the discovery journey at the end of the day. We all shop using our eyes, you know. If you walk into a bricks and mortar store, you're going to look with your eyes. You're not going to start typing something. And we're really just taking that and leveraging visual AI to do it. So our models are basically trained to be able to recognize different items within an image and find, for example, similar items from a product catalogue of a specific organization.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So these models are, you know, constantly being trained constantly being updated. We're constantly finding new use cases and broadening this. What I call this discovery platform. That ultimately is there to help shoppers? As I say, that's one side of what we do the other side. That's, you know, really a bit more sort of on the generative AI front already is product tagging.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: And so this brings me back to what I said earlier about trying to remove the mundane tasks to make you know life just easier, more efficient, more effective, and allow people to focus on, you know, sort of more, if you like, high level or more sort of specific and focus tasks that they could really bring value to. So with AI tagging, well, that basically is again, is you take an image.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: the algorithm will scan it and generate metadata, generate product tags, textual tags that then have a whole host of uses. You know, merchandising teams can use them for SEO you can use them to enrich existing textual search solutions and so on. So it's really kind of all started from that simple red dress and grown from there.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Yeah, yeah, it's really good. Maybe a quick follow just from my own personal curiosity. How much of this training and the data is sort of shared. So you know, you're aggregating a lot of different brands, a lot of different imagery. And then that becomes an asset that helps provide advantage to individual brands.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah. So we, you know, actually, funnily enough, our our training as such is very generic. So if we take the fashion vertical, obviously within that there's a lot of sub sectors. You have, the more luxury, you know. Kind of high level brands high, you know. Then you've got the sort of cheaper
Michael Isaacson - Syte: fast fashion marketplaces, and so on. And we actually train very generically. And one of the benefits. Obviously, I'm not going to go into the secret source. But one of the benefits that we have is that although we are using large data sets, they're actually relatively small to some of the other data sets out there that the companies are generally using. So
Michael Isaacson - Syte: we're training. You know, we basically have a team that their job is literally to find product images tag them. And then that data fed into the model which is trained to produce the latest and greatest. And this sort of is obviously, as I say, ongoing. So you have these incremental improvements in the algorithm and then generally, we won't
Michael Isaacson - Syte: customize or focus that for specific clients, because although you get very different product types and styles between different brands
Michael Isaacson - Syte: most of the time.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: The training as such has got the job covered, anyway. Now, occasionally there are sort of very specific customizations again, without getting to too much detail. But it's surprising, you might think, you know, like, say, a Prada would have a very different kind of product to say a Nike.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: But despite that, you know, we are finding that we're able to train quite generically.
Cass Cross: Okay.
Cass Cross: really eager to hear your answer here.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And one thing I won't talk about is that there are businesses that sort of offer.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: A paid access, and this is part of what makes them a business to sort of each of these things. So if you think about sort of most of our AI today it's largely you could compare it to like a computer. Application is sort of a simple way of connecting the dots for us. Those require a place to be hosted again. There are companies like Amazon that specialize in hosting AI tools, Google and a lot of other companies that provide hosting are certainly kind of pushing into that space.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: You heard Michael talk a lot about the data. And I think one of the really important parts to understand about AI is that
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: with a lot of these tools, they specialize in consuming a specific type of data and then helping, you know, act on that data and through an algorithm or through some learning process, and really, really kind of key.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: thing for me and sort of unlocking how I understood and thought about AI was almost everything is data. I mean, it's sort of an interesting thought to have. But almost every way we sort of experience the road or the Internet can be turned into some sort of data point. And so you think about
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: today's generative AI tools, and and Michael kind of pointing to the example of of site. There's these things which visually we see, and we recognize something as being a red shoe or a dress that has stripes in 2 different colors with a certain cut. All of that is data. And so each of the different AI tools that are out there is in some way trying to act on the specific data set that they're focusing in on
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: the size of the data set or the way of training on that data is often very important in terms of the quality of outcome. Again, just using site as that example. You know, what makes them distinct is the quality of training and the way that they're processing some of that data, because again, people can access images all over the place at large. It's, you know, it's not too difficult. But it's really how you handle that data and how you train your AI
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: or a train, your AI tool set on that data that really starts to make a difference. On top of that, we have the actual interface. I think this is probably the thing that got most of us into AI this year. A a simple chat to, you know, text to text, interface. That we saw with chat gpt really revolutionized how we thought about AI. It was no longer something for research researchers. You know the It team.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: We all know how to text. We all know how to type into a chat window. And that was sort of part of what really unlocked Chat gpt this year in in conjunction with the quality of what it was doing.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And so again, just depending on the type of of use case, you look for different ais based on some of those criteria. If you're a small brand, small business don't have access to a ton of data, you know, you may want to look for an AI or an AI company or company that uses AI that has access to a bigger data. Set that what you can have but would still be relevant to your audience. Similarly, again, you may not want to host your own AI solution. There's a lot of expense that can be involved in that.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: You may not wanna train it. You may not wanna have to build your own interface. And again, there's different businesses out there that are offering each of these different steps or the entire package? As part of their solution. And that's a good way to start beginning to think about.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: How am I going to choose which ones I want to pull into my business or use for my business?
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Do I feel like I can handle the interface? Do I need to incorporate it into an existing software solution of ours. Alongside our interface. Maybe that tells you to go in a particular direction.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Maybe on the flip side, you actually need the whole thing. And and again, that may help you be pointed to a company like site, where again, they're providing really an end to end solution. And what you're offering is sort of that interface to your customers on on the front end of your story experience that that brings
Cass Cross: great. Yeah, that was really helpful. Thank you. And we also have some questions. From one of the attendees to the webinar. Thank you, Harriet for sending in some questions. She's actually a new client of coalition. Welcome to the family. So her first question is.
Cass Cross: we are a new company and with coalition for 4 months. Flavor queue has, and that's the name of our company. Has a product that has never been on the market before. They have no competitors. They convert gas grills to ability,
to, or they give gas girls the ability to grill with high end charcoal. And this is patented.
Cass Cross: And she has. She's saying that flavor queue has a huge obstacle to find people who are not looking for them.
Cass Cross: No one who owns a gas grill can even imagine grilling with charcoal. So finding the buyer is a challenge. It's a new market. She's asking if they have to add apps or tools? Or is coalition using AI and coalitions process in finding a customer for flavor? Queue?
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Yeah, great great question. Actually, I think this is one that you know, we we are really happy to answer. So really, we've integrated AI tools throughout our process. We are aren't aiming to replace the human talent which we're known for.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: With AI solutions we're looking at complementing them with AI solutions. And so everywhere, from keyword research to analyzing some of the actual reporting data we get from individual clients and from all of our clients. It it becomes very helpful for us in terms of deciding how to approach a campaign like that. So in the example, here you have a product that is essentially net new to the market.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: People don't know how to describe it, don't know how to search for it. We may actually be trying to convert a a person who is searching for a charcoal.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: a product? Searching for a gas product over to a charcoal or tell a story that gets them to sort of make that journey and ultimately, again, AI can help us with some of that discovery cause. There are actually keywords that are relevant to that. There are places on the Internet where that conversation is happening?
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: There are keywords that would be related to that. And so how do we actually create the content? How do we present the content? Where do we present the content? How effective is it all of those things are really being assisted in some way, shape or form by AI.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Certainly there are ways that AI can be deployed for individual stores. To help improve that experience. And answer questions or sort of help navigate a search experience so that your individual customers who are arriving at your site are getting to the place. They need to be very quickly, especially if they're sort of fuzzy on the whole concept and that can really help with conversion rate. So thank you. Harriet.
Cass Cross: and actually have a before we get to Jennifer's question. It's a great question. I noticed that a lot of our clients at coalition are asking us whether we're using AI to produce like copy content. So like the written content on their website, which is, you know, part of the SEO scope of work at our agency. Are we doing that, are we not? And why? Jordan?
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Yeah, so really good question. We actually have a little bit of a stick in the mud stance here, especially relating to SEO SEO content. So you know, I'll kind of give you a little bit of the background as simply as I can. Google, does take the job of policing. The first page of search results pretty seriously. Perhaps more than most people would give it credit for and one of the big challenges with large language models and AI generative AI content
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: is that it's often regurgitating a sort of content. In a way that doesn't actually mean anything. And this is sort of a gap in how we often think about these AI tools. A lot of them. Are simply relying on what's the next best word given a topic.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and that can lead to problems in terms of the quality and accuracy of a content that's being produced. And so
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: when you have longer format content that is being produced, you have a tendency to see more a bias show up more what we call hallucinations, where the ais confidently invents a fact or makes a statement. And it's completely false. And you're not sure why. And it's really just because it shows the next best word and so we're very careful about using AI content for SEO efforts. We will use AI to help
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: prompt topics, articles, identify sources, suggest keywords, review competitor sites and content.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: But really, for SEO reasons, we're not often using AI sort of as a wholesale tool to create that for us. We do use AI more more frequently for pay, per click for social media, captions, for things like that. Where, again, the the organic quality and the the review that Google's going to do over that is is is not potentially gonna put a step risk? Does that answer the question? Kes.
Cass Cross: yeah, definitely. And I think personally, the way that I use Chat Gbt is kind of like helping me in my maybe ideating like getting the initial idea. But then I'm always editing what it's actually spitting out for me, especially if it's going to go into an email to someone that I'm I'm sending an email to or if it's gonna be something that is you know, going to a client, especially so I think that definitely tracks
Cass Cross: so Jennifer's question is, what are some of your recommendations for ensuring that the AI you're using isn't biased or providing faulty results.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: It's a it's a really good question, Michael. Maybe go. I've been talking. I'll go to you with this one first. I'll make you. Answer. How do you? How do you keep the AI from lying to you and hallucinating?
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, I think it's it's simply, you know there's there's 2 kind of components here that we need to look at. One is obviously the data, and you know, you can't just rely on a sort of static set of data. Train your model, sit back and think. Oh, that's it, job done, you know. Everything's going to be great. You have to continue to
Michael Isaacson - Syte: gather new data. You have to continue to train the model and then release. Otherwise, you have memory drift. You're gonna be stuck in the past. And yeah, we see this, obviously, for example, with personalization solutions, where, if you're just reliant on data from, you know, 2 weeks ago, one week ago 3 weeks ago. Whatever it may be. If you're not updating that that data set.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: you're gonna get caught out again, left behind, especially take fashion as a classic example where it's trend driven. You don't want to be making recommendations, for example, that are based on trends from a few months ago. So it's all about this. And you know, we talk about AI, and it's all it's all automatic, and it's gonna save people time. But at the bottom line the end of the day
Michael Isaacson - Syte: garbage in garbage out. If you're not having people basically
Michael Isaacson - Syte: ensuring, you have good data training your models, you're gonna end up with biased or ineffective, you know, results. So it's ongoing. It's ongoing work that that is the way we see it. Anyway. Bottom line.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Yeah, it is what I think 2 thoughts there anytime. You see someone present AI as automagical.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: it. It's usually a sign that there's some vaporware there. There's a lot of work that goes into that. And, as you know, often again, it's it's improved dramatically.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: When you interact more with the tool or process that, that is sort of you know your implementation of AI, you know. I think, with with site. There's sort of these these opportunities where you deploy it, but it's made better also by having additional input from users and from from people on the business side to help. Sort of say, like, Hey, this is good outcome, bad outcome, and it makes it really that much more effective.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Ii think again, there's also this kind of big question for me as always sort of where is the data coming from? And how does that AI tool work?
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: If you don't understand those 2 things? You're going to be in a situation where you're likely to see more bias and more faulty results. If you have a brand that has enough data on a topic, there is a chance to begin to privatize or train a certain a tool or AI on your specific data set, and that can actually help sort of narrow things down
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and eliminate some of those likelihoods of bias or faulty results. There are some great open source AI tools
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: which you can, you know, essentially download and incorporate into existing software solutions in certain areas. And then again train on your own data, and again often come up with a better outcome than if you were just sort of relying on a public data set.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: you know where again you might be prone to some hallucination. As a result of that
Cass Cross: alright. And Jennifer actually asked another great question, what are some of the most creative and or effective uses of AI, that you're seeing in the ecommerce space.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Michael, I'm gonna make you answer that one first.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah. Well, again, we talk about bias. Maybe maybe I'm going to bring, you know. Obviously, as I say, with a visual AI based discovery platform, what we're trying to do is ensure bottom line that the shoppers are having a great experience that they're finding what they want and ultimately buying it. And that obviously means we're impacting on the bottom line for the business. You know, I think, with AI and sort of generative AI. And all these buzz words that are out there, it's very easy
Michael Isaacson - Syte: to kind of get sort of swept along with it. But ultimately, you know, if you're talking e-commerce, you need to be driving revenue, and if and if you're using something and it's not driving revenue.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Then, you know, you're really wasting your time. So things like visual AI using it for recommendations, using it for out of stock issues, using it, as I say, to generate product tags, creating additional metadata that then can be leveraged in a whole host of different ways. So there's all of these different approaches that we take
Michael Isaacson - Syte: and there's a lot of other companies out there doing a lot of great things as well, you know, across the board. And be it, you know, talking, marketing copy all the way through email campaigns, whatever it may be. You know, there's so many different areas where there are benefits to be had. But I think 2 things as I say, one.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: It's got to drive revenue and 2.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: It's not sort of a sit back. Let the AI deal with it, and you're done. You have to maintain control. You have to leverage it, you know, especially where you have small teams, and you can basically remove. As I said earlier, some of the mundane tasks
Michael Isaacson - Syte: marketing copy. I've heard, you know, cuss you mentioned about how you would still check your emails. You're not going to send them out after you've generated them.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: I've heard other people talk in terms of Marxing copy and say, you know, we'll we'll use it for brainstorming. We'll generate a lot of copy. We'll look at it. It'll help spark ideas. But at the end of the day we're going to use the talented people. We've got to make the ultimate sort of final version. And and that's what we're going to push out. So
Michael Isaacson - Syte: lots of things to be done, but obviously with a little bit of caution, just make sure that what you're doing has value, and really, can you know, help you drive your business forward.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Yeah, II would jump into. And I maybe I'll give you guys a little bit of a, a, a non biased push. Yeah, I think, one from an agency standpoint. You know we do marketing, or you know, the primary function that we're aiming for is to bring in qualified visits to a site. And you know there's a then become sort of a partnership with our brands.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: We're working with them to hopefully drive some conversions and some things that are happening. A, a, you know. And and that's a that's a a again, a partnership. We depend on on the brand to be competitive to have a good product, to have good customer service to be able to tell a good story. But again, we may not necessarily have a full conceptualization of
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and one of the areas that we often find working with e-commerce brands where there is sort of a shortcoming that does impact conversion rates and outcomes is in search. And and it's one of those interesting areas where people focus on the marketing layer. They focus on checkout in the cart. They focus on the social media content and getting reviews.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And in the middle there, there's this massive thing called search. You know when people are navigating your site that really does drive a lot of success or failure. And so, really, considering how to use improvements to your search as a way of driving more business, I think, is something that's really valuable.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: But kind of a telling thing. Amazon has talked a lot about how they're investing significantly in improving their search through the use of AI tools. and really using that as how they see the next generation of Amazon happening
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: alright. And if Amazon is thinking that way, it's certainly something I think that's probably worth thinking about for for your own site and looking at tools like site. So that you're in a spot where those come in handy.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Some other things that I would recommend. Certainly. Customer service chat bots. Some are now more proactive in helping to sell complex products. During off hours, or preempting sort of a negative customer experience is a really good one. if you look at some of the AI tools that are out there today, also, we're really loving some of the ones that interact with a Crm or a Cdp
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and help you to identify patterns of audiences where you can potentially get a. A customer who comes in takes this particular action, looks at this particular product.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And what do you do with that? And so again, sort of there's some, some AI solutions. Ha! That are out there, for that, again, may require some specific budgets. Certainly the AI content generation can be very helpful. We have a a couple of different technology partners. We work with. That help with, you know, improving product, imagery. And just as a part of of pushing that out to your paper. Click adds and different feeds and things like that.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: So so those are some of the areas where I see a lot of value in AI at at present, and we see some tools happening that way. That are, you are good to look at now.
Cass Cross: Great. And we actually just had a question come in. Do you know any AI tool that
Cass Cross: that has a barcode as a source and can feed a a pim
Cass Cross: with all info. So like title attributes, description, pictures, etc. We've been checking some Chinese commerce agencies that are using Chat Gbt. And mid journey. But I don't know if you know any other system that's more automated. So, and a pim product information platform, right? Can you explain and kind of break down the question for us. Michael or Jordan, yeah.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: yeah. Pims are basically a middleware for a lot of D to C brands and they help you if you're in a situation where
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: you have one product, but it often needs to be described 10 different ways, or presented 10 different ways because of different selling channels you have. So if you have your own D to see e-commerce store, and maybe that's one channel, and then, on the other hand, you also selling 3 P. To Amazon or Walmart, or Target plus maybe you have some resellers some retailers. Also carry your product, and you want them to have something different.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: In those particular spots. That's where a pim can come in handy. It can help you manage inventory again, different attributes for it. I, personally don't know of a tool. That sort of is directly integrated into a bar code and could read something like a bar code or Upc, and then, you know, flip that into some sort of kind of full product profile.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I'm sure it exists. II would have to think about how AI might layer into that so again, you scan a product bar code, get sort of the basic attributes. And then, you know again, through the pim is maybe automatically enhancing some of the the product data.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Again. There, there probably is some out there. I'd have to look at some more PIN partners and see if there's a a solution that could work.
Cass Cross: Kind of reminds me of some features of Site Michael. As far as, like
Cass Cross: site, identifying product attributes like, Am I?
Cass Cross: I don't know.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, no. We obviously have partnerships with several PIN providers. And and again, all of our solutions are, are agnostic, be it to pay more to e-commerce platform and basically what we're doing, as I say, is providing
Michael Isaacson - Syte: product attribution, that in many cases, yes, is then pushed into the PIN stored there and leveraged for a whole host of, you know, functionalities by by the retailer. So yeah, we kind of operate in that space and also on the flip side of that. When you talk about the shopper experience.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: You know, we can leverage bar codes there as well. So if somebody came with a bar code and uploaded that for a search, they could then see similar products based on that. So we're kind of in that sort of sphere in that sort of space. But this particular requirement is something a little bit different, I believe. Yeah.
Cass Cross: And just as a follow up from the same attendee, we've seen some AI solutions that can enrich descriptions and add keywords to the title.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So that is something we we are able to do. Again with this product attribution. With these AI tags we can take those and generate product titles and product descriptions, and you have the flexibility to change the tone, to change the length you know to manually, or, you know, edit them as well, if necessary, before ultimately pushing them out. Or ultimately, once you're happy that you know, it's set up the way you want it can run automatically. So yeah.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: yeah, one of the ways that we've been using. Ai for that content is.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: we've been actually working on a tool that pulls in reviews from large D to C. Review generating platforms, and then supplements your existing title or description. Or various types of description. Again, something like FAQ sections of your pages, or fit guides. recommendations. So actually sort of converting some of what you maybe have like in a a a review platform
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and pulling that back into your e-commerce platform. For use. And so again, sort of enhancing some of what's there already based off of certain other data sets. And so that's been a really valuable use for us. One of the things we love about that
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: is, it is a unique data set to the brand. It is something that is really sort of it's not going to be found elsewhere, online per se, and so being able to take that user feedback, social media comments, things like that, and turn that into some way of enhancing. Some of those descriptions are really powerful for us in terms of
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: some of the the marketing outcomes. We're aiming for
Cass Cross: great. okay? And so this actually leads us into the next question. I really wanted to ask you both, what types of AI do you believe will be most impactful for retail specifically. And why.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Michael, I'm making you answer again. First, yeah, I've got just I feel like. I keep repeating myself with the answers. But you know what we're seeing at the moment in terms of the trends is because everybody's jumping on the generative AI piece. Everybody's looking at data everybody wants to
Michael Isaacson - Syte: ensure. They have consistent data. They're getting the data more quickly that it's basically enriching whatever training. They need to do that. They got good data set. So we're seeing an awful lot of an uptick in the interest around the the product, tagging the automated product, tagging, leveraging the AI there and generating those tags and generating product, title and description that is really kind of blown up in the last, I'd say 6 to 9 months.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: And you know, beyond that, obviously there is, nevertheless, this gradual say, it's much more consistent and gradual uptake of the idea of visual AI, you know, on the ecommerce platform, and, you know, enabling shoppers to use their eyes basically to use the images.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: But certainly the the the product tagging piece is really blowing up
Cass Cross: great and then we got a question from Jennifer. And this is a question from Michael. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges that the integration of AI currently faces? What are some of the biggest challenges you're working through with site.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So I think a lot of it's around expectation. I think, you know, again, people
Michael Isaacson - Syte: are aware of this. It's become a really big buzz out there. And so people come along. They're thinking, Oh, it's AI. It's generated. AI, it's gonna solve all of my problems. It's gonna immediately just create this like magic bullet for the problems we have. And I think it's very important that people.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: you know take sort of a sort of a sanity check or reality check and really focus on what they're trying to achieve, what are the issues they face and what solutions potentially can assist them? And is it? Is it AI. It might well be. There is an awful lot of we've heard earlier an awful lot of great tools out there now, and there's just going to be more and more and things that obviously gonna improve, you know, is it as people iterate and optimize solutions, new solutions come into the market.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Things should get even better. But I think there's a concern. You know, people have that natural concern about oh, we're gonna lose jobs where it's the other robots are, gonna take over, etc. Etc. So there's that as well as just really, you know, aligning their own expectations from each solution as they, you know, try it. So it's about
Michael Isaacson - Syte: taking on board something you think can help but testing looking at the data, looking at the results. Is it benefiting the business?
Cass Cross: So who's doing? AI right?
Michael Isaacson - Syte: I'm gonna I'll let you go get out of Mike. I have some some thoughts here as well, but I know you guys had some really cool case studies. And I think part of the reason we love working with you is that
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: it's a tool that produces results, which is, is always really important for us.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, if we look at companies like hibbits. So you know, hibbits. You know, I'm not American, but they're very large. Obviously. Over in in the States, Sportswear Company during Corona times, in particular, a lot of issues with stock availability.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: And basically what they did is took our out of stock recommendations. Implemented that. And so yeah, massive up upturn in a conversion. So you know, getting like over 2 times higher conversion. The Arpu was going up average order value is increased by over 9%
Michael Isaacson - Syte: and again, there, that's a classic example, really, as I say, is, put a tool in.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: try it out if you think it's going to be a benefit. But look at the data and make sure it's really working for you, and not just in terms of the final conversion. Numbers continue to iterate and optimize there.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: So what Hibbott did was played with the location of site capabilities. So we have a button for the out of stock recommendations. They tried a B testing, move the button around, see what works best. So it's not just a plug and play job done. Let's walk away. Everybody's happy. It's a constant process. And this is the way you know that I think businesses really need to be to to focus
Michael Isaacson - Syte: on the data, on the results and continue to try and refine and check the configurations and move things to really make sure you're driving the most value from something that you're paying for at the end of the day, you know, we're not giving way our solutions for free there are some pretty basic solutions that do, maybe. But if you're paying for something, it's gotta bring you return on investments. And the only way you can ensure that is by that ongoing process.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: so yeah, I mean, I have plenty of other examples. And if Jordan, something else you want to jump in and say, otherwise I can. I can keep going on with examples of sort of success stories that we've seen. Maybe I'll just do one more before you cut me off. Revival rugs. So revival rugs they make rugs that are yeah, one off one off rug. So for them.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: a lot of shoppers are going to come to the website are going to come with intent. They want to buy.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: They see an ice rug. It's sold, it's gone.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Provide similarity. Again, visual similarity. Show them things that are similar.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: You're going to very, you know, quickly and easily have an impact on their ability to have an enjoyable successful experience
Michael Isaacson - Syte: and basically spend money on your site. So again, they're over 3 times higher conversion using sites. You know solutions, average order value uplifted by over 12%. So you know, you can see that you need the results. You need to see that these solutions are actually working.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Okay, I'll stop there, because otherwise I'm just gonna keep going. He's gonna hear more about success stories. And obviously he's not really supposed to be, you know, just about us. Obviously. So yeah, sorry, Jordan. I'm waffling over to you.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I think one of the cool things about sort of the the examples, though, is that a lot of times? What you're talking about are things that aren't necessarily super AI forward to the customer.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: You're not putting Chat Gpt on your website and saying, Here you interact with chat Gpt, here's the silver bullet to make us more successful. There's a big sort of conversation about, you know.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I think honestly, I think there's a little distrust and skepticism around AI that's happening as a consumer.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And so when you blend it into an experience they're familiar with and comfortable with, and they don't necessarily see some of the magic that's happening. It really is pretty powerful, and I think those are the spots often where AI can operate very, very well as an enhancement to what you're doing.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I'm going to kick this one back to you since it is related. Michael, I just saw Jennifer come with question average for seeing results with your technology sort of what's what's sort of a typical Roi or expectation you'd set there.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Yeah, I mean, it's that's a great question. In many ways. It's yeah. I'd love to just say, Oh, it's X, you know, amount of conversion, uplift X amount of aov. But the thing is, you know, we we operate across, you know, several vertical say, but fashion home decor with jewelry as well. You know, including within fashion accessories, bags, and so on. So it really varies, and it obviously also is impacted, not just by the type of business that we're, you know, we're partnering with but also which of our solutions they take
Michael Isaacson - Syte: where they're placing them
Michael Isaacson - Syte: committed. They are as well to that ongoing as I say, iteration and optimization process that we look to constantly. Do. We want to have those business reviews on an ongoing basis to really look at the data. And further, you know, enhance the offering. But
Michael Isaacson - Syte: you know, I've mentioned a couple of examples. We have other companies where, you know, we've seen, you know, sort of conversion rates even higher than that.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: Perry Ellis, for example. Hopefully, people. Some people are familiar with them, you know, penguin brand, for example. So they're nearly 5% higher conversion, 16 average order uplift site shoppers. So
Michael Isaacson - Syte: there's a lot of variance. There is. But at the end of the day, you know, we will only work with companies, and only take on opportunities to partner up with companies where we genuinely believe we can help. So there is a process we want to look at the business. We want to understand. Yeah, the ideal customer profile, what you're doing today, and so on. And then from there we can partner together and really ensure that. You know, we need to bring you Roi. If we're not bringing you, Roi. You're not going to work with us. And obviously, then we've wasted
Michael Isaacson - Syte: not only your time and money, but also a lot of our time and money so very important for us to really approach this on a sort of case by case basis. Really?
Michael Isaacson - Syte: so apologies, not giving you an exact answer, but that's kind of just the reality of it.
Cass Cross: and I think probably kind of the follow up to Jennifer's question around timeframe. It really depends on you know what exact product within site you're using. And and I think the site team, too. You know, we have a lot of experience working with them and working with them with our clients, too. They do a really good job. During the evaluation discovery process of identifying. Okay? What's the problem you're trying
Cass Cross: to solve, or what is your end goal. And so, even before pen is put to paper on any kind of Msa or contract.
Cass Cross: they are working with you. On. Okay, what is the timeframe? That is that you need to achieve this for this to be a successful engagement and partnership.
Cass Cross: And I think you know, they're a really great team and a great partner for that reason. I think they work really honestly with people. As far as like what is realistic in expectation. So I hope that answers your question, Jennifer.
Cass Cross: Okay, so next question.
Cass Cross: when we are working with a client, so a at coalition at our agency. Who hasn't worked with AI before? Where are some of the first places? That coalition starts with them to help them build trust in the technology.
Cass Cross: Good question.
Cass Cross: I think for me how I would answer it is, we want to take a look at the clients tech stack to see what sort of tools they're using. What reviews engine they're using? Maybe. What you know, search merchandising solution they're using because oftentimes
Cass Cross: those tools are rolling out AI features within those tools. So it makes it real easy to try out AI features, because, you know, it's it's simply using a a new feature of something that's already a part of your tech stack. And so we have these partnerships at coalition with these different. With these different technologies like Clavio, like
Cass Cross: Yachtpo, like info be. And so because of that relationship that we have at coalition, we're able to help you use those news new features
Cass Cross: and and also provide that support directly from the tech platforms themselves. So you're not alone in just like, maybe you get a promotional email from a tech partner. Oh, we rolled out this new feature, and you're on your own trying to figure out how to integrate that in your process, coalitions here to help you do that because we actually heard about the rollout before you. Even you even heard about it as a merchant like as a client.
Cass Cross: So in that way I think we can be really good partners. But that's from the partnership side. I'll let Jordan provide his input on this question, too.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: I will say, one of the things, too, is, we're a sizable enough agency where we get to be biased about who we work with from a technology stack.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: We're not in the situation where small agencies often depend on sort of this inbound referral mechanism with their tech partners to stay afloat.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: And and that creates a bias which is, is a real problem and often sort of influences, recommendations that maybe are inappropriate for brands at particular points in their journeys, or based on their vertical and their customers. So you know, part of the difficulty of Cass's job is because we are 300 person agency working with several 100 clients and a variety of verticals as we.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: We're pretty appealing not to sort of, you know, look beautiful here. But we we do get to choose who we work with, and we put time in invest and and into sort of really testing and evaluating who's working
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: when we onboard a new client they come to us with a tech stack, and we'll start to look at what that tech stack is, we'll look for things that we're unfamiliar with.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: and we'll say, like, Is this a value? Add? Is this doing something novel and new, and if it is, it becomes a part of what Cass's job is to sort of go out and evaluate. Hey? Can we involve this for other clients and and repeat that benefit. And so again, part of the beauty of our agencies, we're sort of almost operating like an AI. We're taking information that's gleaned across the whole and then beginning to find what's working for other similar brands. And look at deploying that in a way that's strategically help scale. So
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: in in terms of how to sort of build trust again, I think that's sort of a comment that cast made start with the things that you're already working with that already. Are providing value to you. If it's reviews, if it's email, if it's SMS, if it's customer service, if it's ship time and ship communication if it's customer service and your returns handling things like that.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: Good places to start you know, I think, in in terms of being able to engage with that. I also would say, there's a lot of opportunity sometimes to dabble manually meaning involve a tool in your marketing team before it becomes something. You you know, you look for a tool that is then going to integrate directly into your site.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: As so as an example for you know. Content generation before you sort of allow an AI tool to begin to rewrite certain product descriptions or address. Fa ques automatically.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: On the front end of your site, you know. Test using something like a chat Gpt or a clod or bard, or or some of these other tools to try and do the same thing. And when you see good results that don't require a ton of manual time, it's often an indicator that you can start to automate more of that. And there's usually a tool for that. So that's how we we usually will typically increment with our clients and sort of look at building trust. In a specific tool.
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: We also believe we're a gatekeeper. And so part of our function is, if we bring something to you with a recommendation. We want to do that with sort of the the knowledge that it's going to be a benefit. And we have confidence in it again, given our experience with a lot of other clients in a similar sort of profile to you.
Cass Cross: Yeah. And I think you know. I actually posed your question, Jennifer, to some our Vp of marketing and some of our team leads over chat on the side. And the answer from our Vp of marketing was that you know, we're just very candid about the pros and cons and potential ramifications of using different AI tools we express. Why we use it. And the way we do often really helps people feel safer about it.
Cass Cross: And what what we're seeing across the board is. Our clients are super curious and open to trials in any capacity. I think there's a lot of buzz around AI you could just look at your Linkedin feed, and there's a lot of content coming out about AI
Cass Cross: so like people are seeing it as kind of the wave of the future. But I think what's really important is having, you know, that trusted relationship with your you know, your marketing agency or development partner. And you know.
Cass Cross: going to the people that you trust and then getting their input.
Cass Cross: So yeah, that's
Cass Cross: that's, I think, a good place for us to start to wrap up. We've got 2 min left in the webinar. I just wanna thank you all so much for attending this webinar and if there are any questions that spring up after this. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We've got awesome people folks over at site value partner coalition long time, partner. That, you know, would be happy to
Cass Cross: have a conversation with you about how site works, you know even demo it, for you see, if it makes sense for your brand. On the coalition side. We have a pretty wide breadth of services. We do web development. We also do digital marketing on the digital marketing side. We do everything from SMS to email to SEO. We do paid ads.
Cass Cross: and then, you know, we've got a really strong, robust web development team, too. With experience across multiple platforms like shopify big commerce, adobe magenta wordpress woocommerce. Been around for 14 plus years. So we've seen it all worked with both Ecom and lead generation businesses. So I think, combined coalition and site. We have a lot of really valuable knowledge that we can impart to your teams.
Cass Cross: And happy to have, you know, continue the conversation on this and really appreciate you guys. Joining this webinar Jordan Michael, any parting words.
Michael Isaacson - Syte: I'll leave it to Jordan as the the Guru of these things, I'm I'm a Newbies, all of it. So yeah, I mean love to. If you just are looking for practical tips and just some conversations around AI, certainly willing to to have that chat with you exchange emails. So we'll be reaching out along that front and
Jordan Brannon, President and COO: again. I think you know, big thing, I would plant our flag in the ground on is, we really do believe that we're a bit of a gatekeeper on this for our clients, and they really are depending on us, and we take that responsibility very seriously, because we think it's a big part of what's happening in D Twoc, a retail and e-commerce going forward.
Cass Cross: Great. And you know we're also offering, you know, free SEO technical audits to any attendees.
Cass Cross: Anyone who are Svp's. So reach out
Cass Cross: alright. Thanks. Everybody have a great rest of your day. Re great rest of your week. Take care! Thanks, everyone.