Ecommerce has rapidly transformed in recent years, with the rise of online stores and marketplaces. Retailers are no longer competing solely based on product variety and price points. Instead, the user experience is becoming an increasingly influential factor in determining success in the marketplace. The happier the shopper, the more successful the retailer.

So how do we go about making shoppers happy? Can we pre-empt what they’re looking for? Understand what they’re explicitly asking for? Or a combination of the two, which makes the process conversational. Even better, can we save their time?

Consider this - the attention span of an online shopper is just about 6 seconds. That's how long you have to woo them before they jump ship. No wonder online businesses are breaking a sweat to innovate the user experience and make finding and purchasing products quicker and smoother.

While we can laugh about AI leading us into a future like "The Matrix" or "Wall-E," there's one technology that's winning the ecommerce race right now, and that's Generative AI (Gen AI).

This technology has the potential to change the way a machine and an individual interact - making it more of a conversation. By harnessing the power of generative AI, businesses can better understand and cater to the explicit needs of shoppers, even before they explicitly express them.

What is Generative AI, and why is it important?

Generative AI is a branch of advanced artificial intelligence that generates new

and original content such as text, images, and videos. As AI models become more sophisticated and capable, they can unlock new opportunities for retailers to leverage data, automate processes, and create novel customer experiences. From virtual shopping assistants to augmented reality experiences, generative AI opens up possibilities for growth and innovation in the industry.

Generative AI’s cutting-edge technology harnesses the power of advanced neural networks, such as transformer models, to make sense of huge volumes of data, be it images or text. These networks diligently learn the intricate patterns hidden within the data and then work their magic to generate new data that bears a striking resemblance to the original, i.e., it makes it intelligent, relevant, and human-like. The versatility of generative AI is truly remarkable, finding applications ranging from language translation and content generation to personalized recommendations.

Applications of Gen AI in a product discovery and experience platform like Unbxd

Enhancing query understanding

Generative AI makes Named-Entity Recognition, a.k.a. NER (a model of Natural Language Processing), better - and NER, in tandem with Gen AI, could elaborate the query or search index making the vector representations of the query or index more exhaustive. It also has the potential to make search more efficient - How?

Vector Search technology is used to find and retrieve similar data points or attributes in a multi-dimensional vector space. Intent search (an advanced vector search tech) has the ability to understand where Vectors search is to be used or where simple keywords are enough. Through Gen AI, we could improve NER even more and enable Intent to search to push lesser load onto vector search (which tends to be computationally heavier).

Imagine you're looking for a new smartphone with specific features like a high-resolution camera, ample storage, and long battery life. In the past, you might have spent hours researching different models, comparing specifications, and reading customer reviews to find the right one.

However, with generative AI integrated into Unbxd Search, you can simply enter your requirements, such as "a smartphone with an excellent camera, large storage, and long battery life." The AI-powered system will analyze your query and provide you with a curated list of smartphones that match your criteria, along with relevant details like prices, customer ratings, and key features.

Automating synonym generation

Manual synonym generation for large product catalogs can be time-consuming and challenging to scale. Generative AI automates this process, enabling ecommerce companies to generate synonyms at scale, efficiently, and accurately.

Unbxd already has a vast library of keywords, phrases, and synonyms built on a web-scale data called the Unbxd Knowledge Graph. This Unbxd Knowledge Graph uses various AI models, such as textual similarity and clustering algorithms. Further, it enriches these synonyms based on clickstream data to fetch the most relevant synonyms from the catalog.

Unbxd now further enhances the Knowledge Graph by generating more relevant synonyms using OpenAI. This new AI-powered synonym generator has shown a 140% increase in synonym coverage with an 85% accuracy rate.

For example, if a user searches for "sneakers," generative AI can generate synonyms like "athletic shoes" or "sports footwear" to capture a broader range of relevant products. By incorporating these synonyms into the search algorithm, ecommerce platforms can provide more accurate and comprehensive search results.

Product catalog enrichment

Product descriptions play a crucial role in conveying information to customers about the features, benefits, and usage of a product. Gen AI models can analyze vast amounts of data, including product features, customer reviews, and market trends, to generate high-quality descriptions that capture the essence of each product. With generative AI, companies can automate the creation of unique and engaging product descriptions, blog posts, and other forms of content.

This saves time and effort for businesses while ensuring consistent and compelling content across their catalog.

Improving Visual Search capabilities

Generative AI can assist users in [finding products visually](finding products visually) by understanding and interpreting images. By analyzing the visual attributes of an image, such as color, texture, and shape, generative AI algorithms can identify similar products or visually related items, simplifying the search process and reducing the reliance on textual descriptions.

Personalizing recommendations with conversational AI

The conversational shopping assistant technology has taken the ecommerce retail shopping experience forward through leaps and bounds. It focuses on creating interactive conversations between machines and humans. Its superior intelligence enables chatbots, virtual assistants, and voice assistants to understand and respond to user queries in a natural and conversational manner while maintaining the context of previous conversations.

While online shopping is convenient, one thing we miss is the personal connection and conversations with the shopkeepers, especially at our usual haunts. They remember your preferences and previous purchases. Conversational search aims to replicate that experience, where you can ask for what you need as if the search already knows you, eliminating the need for writing detailed search queries every time. It's about bringing back that personalized touch and familiarity to online shopping.

Generative AI models, such as language models, have been trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to understand user inputs, analyze the context, and generate meaningful and personalized responses. With the help of Generative AI, personalized shopping assistants can understand and interpret user queries, provide product recommendations tailored to individual preferences, offer detailed product information, address customer concerns, and guide users through the purchase process.

Generative AI is poised to revolutionize how we discover and purchase products online. Leveraging the power of natural language processing and understanding, GPT models, such as Generative AI, enable ecommerce platforms to provide personalized recommendations, enhance visual search capabilities, enable virtual try-on experiences, automate content generation, and even forecast future trends. This technology empowers customers with a seamless and tailored shopping experience, ultimately driving business growth in the ever-evolving world of ecommerce. And Unbxd is working hard towards perfecting these capabilities, giving ecommerce retailers a competitive edge.

Stay tuned for the latest exciting developments!