When interacting with product information management (PIM) systems, artificial intelligence (AI) is showing its capabilities in many fields. It's safe to say that e-business owners can now eat several pieces of the pie at once.
When interacting with product information management (PIM) systems, artificial intelligence (AI) is showing its capabilities in many fields. It's safe to say that online business owners can now eat several pieces of the pie at once.
The combination of these two cutting-edge solutions - AI and PIM - has created a powerful duo to support eCommerce businesses even more efficiently, to torpedo the chosen market (not only the local market) with a synergy and efficiency unknown until now.
But what does the combination of AI and PIM really mean? How do these two technologies combine to help online businesses? To answer these questions, let's get the basics straight.
Have you ever thought about what you are actually selling in your online store? Contrary to the common perception, you're not really selling your products, you're selling their ideals built in the mind of the buyer. Therefore, the better the descriptions, photos, specifications, the more accurately your customers will experience the product, and thus be more likely to buy it. This is what PIM is useful for.
PIM provides better product information that improves the customer's buying experience. It helps reduce your costs, improving the efficiency of your entire team. PIM is there to help you better showcase your products in your e-commerce business.
PIM, or Product Information Management, is the tool where you store, manage and enrich information about your products. It's a command center from which your products can be distributed to all sales channels.
On the other hand, what is artificial intelligence (AI)? Simply put, it's systems or machines that mimic human intelligence to get tasks done and its performance successively improve based on the information they collect.
According to Harvard Business Review, the main applications of artificial intelligence in businesses are:
The effectiveness of using PIM and AI separately in enterprises is undeniable. But what happens when you combine the two technologies?
According to Gartner, the development of AI has accelerated dramatically, with many AI technologies expected to become mainstream in the next two to five years (reported in 2021), and users looking for specific technological capabilities that go beyond those of current AI tools. Not surprisingly, we see "AI"-related terms almost all over our social media and browsers on a daily basis already. We test ChatGPT, type abstract questions, create queries and intricate dialogues. Some of us are having a great time, others are anxiously wondering what's next. It can be thought today that in 2023 the AI market is no longer in the state of evolution mentioned in the report, but of revolution.
Experts from Forrester Research emphasize: "Companies that do not have a high-quality PIM system run the risk that the information they publish will meet only minimal market requirements and will not be sufficiently aligned with customer expectations."
Forbes predicted that retailers will spend $7.3 billion on AI-based technologies in 2022, while Meticulous Research predicted that retail AI will reach $19.9 billion by 2027. It's safe to say that AI is making waves in retail. Artificial Intelligence can help brands create personalized experiences online and offline, and it can also help organizations automate and streamline their operations.
How do PIM + AI complement each other in this digital revolution?
Imagine another day consisting entirely of manual work, of collecting product information from multiple sources and populating the PIM system with it. What do you feel? Obviously, this is not a dream job for even the most tenacious product information specialists, let alone the rest of the e-commerce workforce.
Thanks to the power of AI, which harnesses the qualities of the human mind to solve problems and learn from external experiences, and PIM (Product Information Management), which systematizes an organization's product data; e-commerce businesses can now organize product data even faster to reduce a significant amount of manual work for the content team.
We've incorporated the latest AI and machine learning features into Ergonode PIM, resulting in catalogs being populated with relevant product descriptions and translated in just a few clicks!
Internal tests indicate that the average time to fill one product card with content without using AI is 45 - 90 minutes on average. With AI, the same task takes just a few seconds! This function relieves the editor from the tedious task of searching and organizing product information to prepare descriptions.
What does it look like in practice? Just click the "Auto-generate content" option, select the attributes you want the content to be based on, and you're done.
In Ergonode, we also give you the ability to copy an attribute value from another language with simultaneous translation. From now on, it only takes two clicks to become global. Keep this in mind when entering new markets ;) All you have to do is check and approve what the system suggests.
Thanks to the synergy of PIM and AI (even in spite of the pandemic), global e-commerce retail sales have seen growth of 16.5%. AI systems enable an exceptional customer experience, guiding consumers to make purchases (automated content creation, personalized product recommendations, conversational commerce).
We know that proper personalization and nurturing a positive experience for a potential customer increases the chances of turning them into an end customer. Proper parameterization of product content, such as displaying multiple high-quality images, adding video, providing detailed information about them, or at least creating size guides - should become a "must have" for online businesses. You can already turn these and other parameters into unique descriptions and their translations with PIM and AI tools.
Let's list and summarize the main benefits of combining a structured PIM with the irreplaceable power of AI:
Will all product information be automated? No. Ergonode has created PIM for teams where the human factor is still irreplaceable, playing a major role. We advise that before publishing any AI-derived data, you read the generated content and confirm compliance with expectations. In this way, the entire process of creating a product description as an editor is shortened considerably; you save a lot of time on other roles by not having to search for information and create text from scratch.
It is important to remember that algorithms are more efficient when they work on structured data. To get the best results, you need to store your product data in a systematic and logical structure - in a PIM. This will help the bots make connections that are relevant to a specific trade and become smarter and more useful. AI algorithms learn from your data, so the more often you use this feature, the more accurate AI suggestions will be.
I hope I've convinced you to open yourself up to the revolutionary new possibilities in e-commerce. That you are one step closer to the decision of saving time and money in a smart and accessible way thanks to the synergy of PIM with AI.
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