AI for eCommerce: Putting AI to Work to Sell Products

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Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who want to know how to use AI. Today, I'm going to be joined by Sharon Guy, and we're going to explore AI for E commerce. If you have B2C focused products that you're trying to sell, you might find some really interesting tidbits in today's interview. And if you're new to this show, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Sharon Guy.

Helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Sharon Guy. If you don't know who Sharon is, she's an E commerce strategist and consultant that helps B2C brands improve their results with AI. She's also the author of E Commerce Reimagined Retail and E Commerce in China. Her podcast is called B2B Breakthrough. Sharon, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Thanks so much, Michael. I'm doing great.

Awesome to have you. Today, Sharon and I are going to explore how to employ AI in a business. Before we go there, I want to hear your story. How'd you get into AI? Start wherever you want to start.

Yeah, I'll tell you the exact date. Actually, it's a night that I got started in AI. It was a dark and stormy night in 2017. I was in the city of Hangzhou and I was working as a category manager within this platform called tmall. So, unbeknownst to a lot of people, tmall is the Amazon of China. It's actually several times bigger than what Amazon is just because of the sheer population size that China has. And there's this thing that's called double 11. If you've ever heard of that? So that's also. There's another term called Singles Day. It's similar to a Black Friday. It actually occurs right around the same time in China. So now on November 11, even in the US or other Western countries on Instagram, you'll start seeing singles day or like that being a campaign. So it's gradually made its over to the West. That's a whole nother story. But so it was double 11 campaign season and I was elected to be PM of our little group. It was midnight and yes, we were still all working at that hour. It's a different type of work schedule in China. And I was called in and they said, we have this new design tool we would love to show you. So I go into the room along with several other people. We're like huddled around one person's computer. They're like, look, we can take this one photo and with a prompt, change this background to entirely whatever it is that you want this background to be. And now you no longer need to have your hundreds of designers working in this large team fixing any of that. So we were just like, is this like, I was on my way out, I'm going home. But we ended up staying for another hour or so just to play around with the tool. And that was the first day that I realized that I was going to change a lot of things in E commerce. But specifically just on this design part, it was going to save a lot of our, not just our designers hours, but just us in terms of coordination.

Keep sharing the story. Somewhere along the line you end up working for yourself. Right. So keep going with your story.

So I worked in Alibaba for many, many years, transitioned into many different teams, Went from the Chinese side to the international side and then fast forward. If we keep on pressing the fast forward button, I eventually go to Pattern. Pattern is Amazon's largest third party seller. So pattern works with about 200 or so B2C brands. Everything from Stance Socks to Adidas to Pandora to Garden of Eden Health supplements. Every type of cat category product you can think of that will sell on Amazon or that somebody will want to buy on Amazon. And then I eventually, throughout all of this time in my corporate journey, though I had always been speaking. I was part of that first pilot project training people internally in a company. Or I'd be called up by an event organizer and be asked to speak for a conference. And once your name starts popping up on some of these websites, these event websites, other event organizers catch wind and then see you speak also. And then it just snowballs from there. So nobody exits out of college at the age of 22. The career paths of doctor, lawyer, engineer is all there for an Asian person too. Nobody has keynote speaker as an alternative role that you could ever launch your career in. But there I was discovering the speaking industry and now another two years or so later, I'm on my own doing the speaking thing. I write a lot as well. I consult for brands and now it's, it's a, it's a period of discovery for me in terms of whoever finds my content relatable, useful, usable, I will go do an internal workshop at their company or even one on one. Coaching or consulting by the hour. Sort of depends on the client.

Has AI always been a part of this thing or is it mostly just the. Because it sounds like a lot of your experience obviously was on the E commerce side of things, but I'm curious about how AI is like woven into the business today.

Yeah, so I think my core is definitely the, the E commerce branding side of things and the AI part is just how it's changed this whole industry. So if you even look at E commerce platforms, whether it's TMALL or it's Amazon, it's just everything that we do has been pivotally changed from a foundation level of how we reach our customers. Who do we target, all of these emails that we're writing, it's now personalized to the actual customer. All of those, the mechanics side of things is what we all had to non stop learn. I'm definitely not out here writing code to build a LLM of my own. I don't have the billions of dollars to do so. But I think my role is to know about these different types of LLMs that are out there, know what's useful, and then apply that to the business owners that it's useful for.

Love it. So there's plenty of people listening right now who are marketers or entrepreneurs or creators of products and services and they're probably curious why AI from your perspective, for anybody who's selling a product or a service, why is AI something that's so important for them?

Yeah, so for E commerce, the thing that it's simply changed in the E commerce world is personalization. So I always start a lot of my keynotes with this story, which is where if you imagine one day in the future and you step outside of your door to pick up a package that there's a drone that flies out to you and drops off a package in front of you and you had never touched any type of shopping app to order it. You didn't go to Amazon.com to get it, you didn't go to any type of dot com. The company just knew what to send you because it knows you so well. And that also in this futuristic world, there's no return policy because there's no need for you to return anything because the company knows exactly what you needed to buy. So that's always a story that I like to start off with just to sort of jolt a lot of listeners or the audience. And then I go into saying that this, it's borrowed from a sci fi novel, it's a first chapter. Everyone thinks it's so ridiculous, but yet it's actually a lot closer to us than we think. The whole reason for that, that e commerce platform can know what exactly to send you without you ever having to shop from. It is because from all the clicks, the impressions, the conversions, the add to carts that we as the consumers have fed into the platform, it will ultimately know you so well and draw up this consumer profile for you so well that it might know your needs and wants a lot better than what you think you need.

Yeah, and that's not a surprise to any of my listeners, to my social media marketing podcast, because Obviously Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, I mean these are all great examples of big, humongous companies that are serving up content that they know we're interested in that we don't even necessarily ask for. Right. So it's not a big stretch that E commerce big behemoth companies like Amazon's of the world would know a lot more about what we would likely be interested in than we even know ourselves. But I guess what I'm hearing you say is that's all powered under the hood by AI. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely. So machine learning is this thing that everyone's trying to ramp their heads around. I don't think it's necessary to become so technical to be able to write that code yourself, to write it as part of your e commerce website if you're running one. But to know who to go to, who to hire to write that, or what sort of companies you can go to to have that as part of your website. But it's definitely changing. And I always like to equate or use personalization also in another format, which is the area of live streaming. So if you are a TikTok user, there's a lot of live streamers going live. They are usually selling on TikTok shop, talking about whatever their store is. And in China, in the live streaming space, you also have not just human live streamers, but AI live streamers or avatar streamers as well. And those people could be programmed to look like you. So for instance, if I'm selling sunscreen, for instance, and I have this streamer who's I don't know, 60 years old, he lives in Costa Rica and he's selling me sunscreen and that sale will probably be a bit less likely to happen versus if the live streamer that was selling me this product was somebody that's around my age range, kind of looks like me, Asian, located in a large city, talking about the things that I would relate to. And that's the part about personalization that's so fundamental to E commerce that AI is changing, which is having your product be told whether it's a story or whether it's the salesperson behind this product selling it to be personalized to the end customer.

Okay, so I'm going to say what I think a lot of my audience is probably questioning in their mind. This personalization concept seems out of reach for any small business. Is it true or is it not true? You know, do you have to be a multi billion dollar company to be able to accomplish what we're talking about here?

Well, I mean, yes and no. So this tech type of technology specifically in the live streaming space.

I'm not focused on the live streaming space as much as I'm focused on personalization in general.

Oh yeah, then it's definitely a very reachable tool by any means. By so many different products have that personalization feature within it. When you're doing email marketing for instance, you can always use something like mailchimp which has hundreds of thousands of small business owners using that for their lowest tier is I think $13 a month or something called Movable Inc. Which is also in the same sphere where they're able to see who your customers are and then change or you are able to coordinate what your segments are and then send an appropriate email message to them based on their customer journey. So whether they've just added something to cart and now you're trying to push them to convert, or, or they've visited your website a bunch of times, looked at many different SKUs, many different product pages, but just has added nothing to cart, a certain message to send to them, or someone who's had a loaded up cart but just has not bought or not converted, the messaging for each of those people is different.

Oh, that's really useful. So just so I'm clear, so and, and this is great because this is bringing it down to the practical, tactical stuff that a small business person who is my core audience might relate to. What I'm hearing you say is that a lot of these solutions that people use for their email service provider might have either integrations with third party tools or might have feature sets that will leverage AI to essentially do the heavy lifting of what you're talking about with this personalization. Right. Presumably they will identify the audience and maybe even write the message. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Or help you craft it.

The messaging part is definitely being tested by many different tools. So my sphere is B2B for my own business. So I use Apollo. And Apollo has a lot of those AI generated messages where. So this is a certain person and I'm trying to write this message instead of. You know, sometimes we want to be perfectionists and we want like every T crossed, every I dotted, or at least I have sat for a long time and written out this very, very short email message, but I just took so long doing it. And now AI, you can use some of those AI tools to write it for you.

Love it. Is it just Apollo, such a broad term? Is it Apollo AI or something like that?

Do you know what it's called, the actual website? I think it's Apollo I.O. if I'm not mistaken.

Okay, cool, Perfect. All right, thank you for going down that rabbit hole with me because I think that was really important to help kind of understand what this personalization stuff could mean at an actionable, practical level today for someone in business. When it comes to start leveraging AI into a business, especially an E commerce business, what do people need to be thinking about first?

So I always like to tell a lot of people about the E commerce equation and I write about this in my book as well. In fact, the book is focused on this type of framework. But I also think this pertains to not just somebody in the B2C lane, but B2B as well. So the E commerce equation goes your GMV. So your sort of your revenue or your total sales equals to the amount of traffic that's coming into your website multiplied by an AOV or average order value. So how much are they buying on your website multiplied by a conversion rate? So out of 10 people, how many people is actually clicking buy? And the way that I like to implement AI is look at those three functions and see what are we using to increase to bump up each one. So under traffic, what can we do? What type of AI tools can we use to Bump up our traffic. Everyone wants more traffic. More people are coming to your site, the more likely there someone is converting. So within that sphere there's what I also call a push and pull. We can get into that in a little bit. And then in the AOV side it's how can we get people to buy more? So if I've bought a book from your website, can I get this person to add a course or inquire about another service? And then in the final bucket, the conversion rate side is sure, maybe a lot of people is coming to your site. Your traffic level is through the roof. But if nobody's buying, nobody's converting, then that's still potentially negative dollars too because of all that money you're spending to gather people onto your website, which you're doing through, through paid ads or other methods. But nobody's converting. So that's also a problem. So how do we raise that conversion rate? So that's where I like to start with at least.

I love that. Let's just roll backwards From a conversion rate perspective. There's a conc, you know, in the marketing world called conversion rate optimization or CRO, I would imagine there are AI based tools that can automatically run split tests for you maybe and figure this stuff out. I've not found any yet. Are you aware of any AI based tools that can help with running split tests on like landing pages or product checkout pages or anything like that? I'm assuming they're coming if they don't already exist.

Something that I've seen that other e commerce I'm interested is Canva and using their tool to test conversion rate. So I actually just saw on someone's LinkedIn post of Amazon recently is starting to do a lot of these conversions in and of itself. So sometimes you feed Amazon 9 different product photos if you sell on Amazon and those nine product photos are all displaying different things. Sometimes it's just the product on a white background, sometimes it's a model that's holding this product, sometimes it's this product is it's camping gear and the background instead of it being white or a model using it, it's within the mountains. Sometimes it's the product removed from the packaging and sort of laid on top of it. So there's so many different ways that you can show off this product and all of those main product photos will have different conversion rates. And so Amazon is doing this thing where they're seeing which of these nine is actually raising our conversion rate. And if that's the winner then we're going to automatically change that photo to be your main photo with your permission, but they'll suggest it to you.

I love it. It's such a simple concept. As far as average order value, are there AI tools that specialize in upsells and cross sells or what are we talking about when it comes to AI and increasing average order value?

There's something called fin. It's made by this company called Interplay. So it's a chatbot that pops up when you're considering certain products. And that's AI powered. But a couple of iterations before that, the premise was that if there's somebody that's sort of on the site guiding you or talking to you or figuring out this purchasing process with you, that you are more likely to buy more because this person will always be asking you. This person, this bot will always be asking you. So you just got this tent. Do you need this outdoor cooker or these waterproof shoes or this type of very sturdy mug to. To go with, you know, like, is your whole order actually complete? And they're always trying to bundle everything together so that they can give you a more. A more holistic solution.

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Yeah, so this is also part of a lot of my presentations, which is this matrix that I use. It's unnamed so far, so if you have a good name, let me know. But it's inspired by the Eisenhower matrix. And the Eisenhower matrix, if you can Google that was a way for people to organize, to do lists, to see what is priority and what is what can even fall off of that, what you can eliminate from that to do list. And so if you imagine X and Y axis and the X axis being urgency, the Y axis being importance, you'll have these four different quadrants. You'll have things that are very urgent, very important, things that are not so urgent, very important, things that are less important urgent, and things that are less urgent and less important. So these sort of four categories and what's recommended by, I guess it's named after Eisenhower or is it was how he did things is the things that were very urgent and very important he would put to do right away. Things that were less urgent but still important to schedule them. Things that are less important but also very urgent to delegate it to somebody else because you don't actually have to focus on it. And then the things that are less urgent and less important to just delete it. So Pareto Principle 80 20, there's 80% of most people's businesses come from 20% of the actions that they do. And so there's a large chunk of things that you can probably just ignore so that you can focus on what you should actually be focusing on. Inspired from that, I created a matrix that's very similar and instead of urgency, it's impact. And by impact I mean those three metrics. So the gmv, the traffic, the aov, the conversion rate. So what are you doing that's actually causing your GMV be to go up? And so I have my four quadrants as well. The things that are low impact but very high effort, you just do not do you just delete it because it's low impact, there's going to be not much benefit to your business and it's a lot of effort to accomplish that. So you just delete it. There's things that are very high impact but low effort. So those are the sort of low hang fruit and that's what I advise you to do right away. There's things that are high impact but also high effort. So those things you invest in, so those are things that you still watch out for. And maybe you're, you're scheduling it sometime to be visited sometime down the road, you're still investing in it. And then the low impact and low effort type of things that you consider doing, but they're definitely at the lowest part of your to do list. And so if you use that same mindset to look at all the different AI tools that you could be using, the, the different types of optimizations that you can do for your E commerce website, you can very clearly know exactly what's going to do the most for your business.

Very cool. It makes a lot of logical sense. And for some people, what, for example, Sharon, what you think is high effort might be low effort for someone like me, right? Because it depends. Each person has their skills and gifts. For example, if you're a coder, let's say I'm a coder and you're not a coder. Even though I'm not, it might be easy for me to code. It might be very hard for you to code. So yeah, that's really cool. I like that matrix a lot. So once we put AI to work inside the business, let's say we're actually achieving some of the benefits you talked about earlier with this personalization utilizing artificial intelligence. Any guidance on how will we know if it's working? Because that's one of the big questions, right? When you're about to put something to use inside. At least my company, we have, we call them experiments, right? And we have a hypothesis. And if we don't meet the hypothesis, well, then we don't continue the experiment or we modify our metrics or whatever. So what's your thoughts on, like, how to know whether it's working once we've employed it?

So the, the good part about that e commerce equation is everything is numerical. There's a before and after picture of everything that you can from all of those experiments. It's not something qualitative. All of it is quantitative. So before you implemented this particular tool, what were your numbers? What was your traffic? What was your aov, what was your conversion? And then what's your resulting gmv? And then after you've implemented this new thing, how do those numbers change? Sometimes those numbers, certain numbers will go up and certain numbers will go down. But the ultimate GMV number is what you're gonna base a lot of.

What is that acronym again? Gmv. Is that right?

GME stands for gross merchandise value.

Ah, okay, good. That's good. I'm glad you said that. So the gross merchandise value is the Result of the formula you've been talking about earlier, Is that correct? Correct.

Yes. Yes. So for B2B businesses it could be just revenue generated.

So what are we looking for? You know, how much of an impact are we looking for with AI? Are we looking for double the number of what it was before or like what's in your experience a good growth metric? Because I would imagine we could improve these metrics without AI. You know, for example, we could run experiments just by altering a couple pictures ourself on our e commerce site or by changing up some of the headlines in some of our ad a little bit. So what kind of incremental expectation is there when we're employing AI here?

There's no sort of clear cut answer of if it's 2x your productivity that it's the implementable for the business because it also depends on the cost. I think what is pretty good with a lot of these AI tools is a lot of these AI tools are also at a current period of getting their own users and a lot of it is subsidized by a lot of VC dollars as well. Well, there's a lot of first usages or there are certain AI tools where I ran out of my free credits but because I pinged the product manager at this particular company and I said I love your product, I would love to continue using it but I just don't have the money to afford your X dollars of enterprise license right now. And then he was able to give me another month for free. So there's these little things where you can tweak but. But yeah, so I would say there's no particular number per se but it's definitely measured more holistically by customer results. So if you look at your NPS score or just ratings and reviews, if they have gone up your employee satisfaction, it's something that you can consider holistically.

So let's talk about how you Sharon are employing AI inside your business. Just kind of give us a little bit of a peek under the COVID of like how you're using it grow your business.

So I use a lot of the LLM. So the ChatGPT is. And you and I we talked about Claude. I think I did start to try out Claude as well.

Love Claude everybody. What's your thoughts on it? Just out of curiosity, do you enjoy it?

So this is the other part. I think that these LLMs are also in a race to which is how much it's personalization once again it's how well do they know you already ready And I think that's going to make a huge difference. So, Claude, I'm a new customer. It knows nothing about me at all. I'm starting from scratch in terms of my inquiries. It knows none of my documents, the way that I answer things, what I say, yes, that's a good answer. No, that's a good. It has that. None of that data. ChatGPT, on the other hand, which I've used since their launch, has all of that data. I've dumped documents in there. I'm a 4.0user, or I'm a paid pro planner end user. Its memory updates every time I write in a question. So the answers that ChatGPT gives me, if it's the same question, as of this moment, because I have not done anything much in Claude yet, it's still ChatGPT that's winning for me, but that's because it knows me so well.

Well, and by the way, that's the great news about their business model, because they got this incredible lock in effect, right? Because they're upgrading and learning things about you as a user and they're optimizing their output on the fly. I will tell you, I use both very religiously and my simple Cliff Notes version on what CLAUDE can do that CHAT GPT struggles with is better mastery of the English language. So ChatGPT tends to be very simple and very basic in the way that it writes. And if you go and you give the exact same command to Claude and you work on it on micro doses, almost like, here's a paragraph, improve it or simplify it, or rewrite this and make it easier to understand, you're going to begin to understand. Generally speaking, Claude will be chatgpt, like five to seven times out of 10. And over time you'll begin to realize that what CLAUDE is really, really good at is its creative mastery of the English language. What ChatGPT is really good at is its overall broadcast understanding of almost everything. And when you begin to realize, like, CLAUDE is kind of like the English language professor that you could pull out, or the creative person that you need another angle on it, that's kind of how I look at it. Like, when I'm writing things, I almost always start with CHAT GPT and then I use CLAUDE to do like, small little refinements. And I'll give you one more example. I've given ChatGPT a ranking system to rank itself, and generally it's very bad at ranking itself for improvements where I can give the same exact. Like, I can say, rate this on a 10 out of 10, ChatGPT will rate itself 10 out of 10 on almost everything where Claude will say, well, it's 7.5 out of 10 and here's some areas to improve it. So if you are a master craftsperson with language, that's where Claude will be kind of your secret back pocket thing. In addition, Claude is exceptionally good at doing open ended analysis where ChatGPT is horrible at it. So let's say you've got a survey of open ended data results or you collected at checkout. Why did you buy this product? You put that anonymized CSV file into both. Claude will crush ChatGPT every time and it will provide you so much more depth and analyzing that open ended data, which ChatGPT just does not understand how to do. Now that's just my professional opinion, but you'll notice that a lot of the podcasting community is really big on Claude and it's mostly because it's just so much more sophisticated in its ability to do like English language queries. So hopefully that's valuable for you and everyone else that's listening. I know you're using perplexity and people have talked about that before on the show. I'd love you to explain to everybody why you love it and what you do with it.

Yeah, and I think another important thing to Note is these LLMs, they all come in favor, fall out of favor, and it's sort of all ebbs and flows because there's constant iteration and stage. Product Perplexity, I think, was a clear winner for me. I almost only used that maybe in this year around April, May, that timeframe, because at the time it was able to cite everything. So every single answer that it developed, there were citations that followed. And if you want to dig deeper to a particular sentence, you just click into the citation and it takes you to the original article. ChatGPT always gave you just this paragraph answer. You don't have to if it's right, you don't know if it's wrong, you don't know where it got it from. But over the months, ChatGPT also weave that into their product, which is the citation aspect. I think though what's important perplexity for E commerce owners or anybody that owns a website though, is what it's doing in E commerce. So I've also noticed, or I've started to notice, that perplexity is starting to enter into E commerce itself. So now a lot of people are searching for products in these LLM context windows. So for instance, if you are Trying to buy a phone case, and I wrote about this in One of my LinkedIn posts is you try to buy a phone case. You can put that in Google Durable phone case. A lot of these links show up. You have to click into each of those ones. You see the price. You're comparing. It is this one where you read the reviews in Perplexity. Same query going in. It'll pull up all of those different pieces of info in one page. And then you as a potential buyer, all you're doing is reading that one page and then making a decision. I think Perplexity is also in the beginning stages of testing this out, which is the big question I had when all of these LLMs came about is how are they going to monetize? Are they just going to monetize by the little $20 a month that every user is going to give it? Because that's not the. Especially if you're a search engine or these are now called answer engines. That's like the lowest hanging fruit for monetization. And I think what I'm seeing a lot of these LLMs turn into is monetization through ads, because that's exactly what Google did. Is it shot to its current stance in or current size? Because it's a huge ad tech player. It's the biggest ad tech player there is. And I think what's going to start to happen for a lot of these LLMs is they're also curving that direction. They don't know how to actually do it. So how do I as a business advertise my services in these answer machines? I know how to do it in Google. I'll go to Google Ads or YouTube or in that whole ecosystem? But how do I do it? How do I make my results show up when my potential buyer is searching for something that I can cater to in these answer engines or these LLMs? This is, I think, the beginning of what we're seeing in the world of aeo. So we all know what SEO stands for. There's now this term called aeo, which is answer Engine optimization. So how do you fine tune your website? How do you write things in a certain way so that it appears in an LLM? Because the trend now is a lot of people are changing their search pattern. So before we all stuck to Google, we. Unless you're a Bing user, can't forget about the small percentage of those people. You know, you're largely searching within this traditional search ecosystem. But now, as these LLMs are entering the scene, I myself have also conducted so Many of my searches in an LLM instead of Google. And I did this poll in my LinkedIn of how many people are actually starting their searches in a traditional search engine versus an LLM. And my results were pretty stark in a 3070 split. So 70 is still on the traditional side, 30 is in the LLM. But I think I did that survey maybe two months ago now, and I think that that number is just going to keep on going up.

I think you're totally right. So you're using Perplexity less because Claude is essentially doing some of the same stuff. Is that what I heard you say earlier or it's just not as important for you as it was before?

I'm using Perplexity a little less now. I use it a lot before because of its citations, and it was ChatGPT. As soon as ChatGPT started with its citation part of that product, I think that pulled me back a bit more. But I think with the two, I'm still pretty 50. 50, I would say.

When we were prepping for this, you said you had created a custom GPT of yourself. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with that and how you did that? Just for people that are curious, there's.

A GPT store in ChatGPT. A lot of different companies have created a B2B branded version, so you can go to that particular GPT and type anything or ask anything you want to. My GPT is. It's set on private mode because it's not a product that I'm releasing.

No, no, I know, but you're using it for yourself, obviously. How are.

Oh, yeah, I'm using it for myself. Myself, yeah.

What is it doing for you? That's what I'm curious about.

So I do a lot of speaking and I do a lot of training and I have a lot of decks and I have a lot of scripts in there. My decks change all the time. And sometimes I get asked for this industry and that industry and every single different industry has its own unique little sort of things. And I could do like a grand search within my just MacBook of pulling everything out, but obviously the MacBook search functions is very, very weak. And so what I've done is just dumped a lot of those files into my GPT so that I'm prompting from that and it's able to remember a lot more than my human brain can remember.

So what are you asking it, for example?

So if I'm speaking to a group of women who is in the Specialty Equipment association, on this date, based on what I had created in a deck from this, this and this date because. Because this was a very similar group of people. What else can I do to improve that presentation or what is my main message?

Oh, I love that, I love that. So it's almost like a little consultant for you. It's a mini version of you, right? I mean, you're using it to help you remember what you've done and it's searching your decks that you've uploaded into it, but it's also helping you figure out what you ought to change in your next speech. Is that right?

Yeah.

I want to ask about what else you see going on in the AI frontier and I think we probably ought to talk about what you see happening in China. So because obviously that's an area you have some experience in. So what do you want to say about that?

I think what's happening in China in terms of generative AI, there's many different, I think waves that's happening. So in the visual sort of prompt to photo prompt to video tool, what I see is when one tool gets released in the US like 10 other of the same things get released in China, because that's always been the nature of the competitiveness of tech that we've seen. I think what China is not so great at is being highly innovative in creating the next big tool. So they're very good at taking whatever has been created and making many, many different versions of it and then training the models for it to get better. So all the soras that we've seen from OpenAI or the InVideo type of tools that we've seen, there's a lot of those equivalents in China now. I think going forward in the e commerce space though, China just has a lot better of a foundation in terms of what it has already tested, whether it's genai related or a product or merchandise related. I mean, if you look at the current fast growing e commerce sites of the Sheins and Temu's and now TikTok Shop, those are all Chinese companies that a lot of people don't know. The fundamentals or the core of what, what is happening there is studied a lot by Amazon product managers and Walmart product managers. So I think in that field it's a great idea to continue to look towards what's happening in China for that, even the droning example. So they used to open a lot of my keynotes with that story. And then a couple of months later there is this app called Meituan which is A doordash similar app in China is literally doing that. So they're actually delivering via drones to certain households if you live in a certain part of Shenzhen. So in that specific area I think China is a very formidable player to to look at that.

Very cool. Sharon, if people want to connect with you on the socials or discover more about your business, what's your preferred platform? I know you mentioned LinkedIn earlier. Maybe that's the one.

Yeah, LinkedIn is definitely the one where I update most frequently. I'm also on Instagram at its Sharon guy and also TikTok Sharon guy. My last name is Gai so it's very easy to remember. I'm in this AI world but also my website so sharing guy.com that's where I publish most of my findings, what I'm using lately, what I've discovered, my opinions on a lot of different industries and people can also if interested in the E commerce side of things and what's happened in China to check out my book also called E Commerce Reimagined.

Sharon, how cool is it that your last name has eight AI and I didn't even recognize that when I first saw it. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Sharon Guy and sharing your insights with us today. Really appreciate it.

Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com a20 and be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast app. And would you share this show with a friend? You can. You can tag me. I'm Stelzner on Facebook. I'm ikestelsner on X. And do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk show. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored podcast. I'm your host Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

The AI explored podcast is also production of social media examiner.

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