EP. 73- How AI is Changing E-Commerce: CMO of $2B Bloomreach Amanda Cole I Expert Quick Tips

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Welcome to do this not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this. Not that I am excited. I'm ex. I actually am.

Sometimes I say I'm excited, but this time I'm actually excited for this episode of do this not that. We have an amazing guest and let me tell you who she is before I have her tell her all about herself. So we have Amanda Cole.

Amanda Cole is the Chief Marketing Officer at bloomreach. Now, you should know what bloomreach is, but if you don't, they're awesome. First of all, this whole episode is going to be about AI and e commerce.

And let me tell you about Bloomreach. Bloomreach, first of all, is valued at over $2 billion. This is real deal.

They're one of the leading providers of SaaS solutions that help e commerce companies grow their revenue, loyalty and efficiency by delivering product, personalized and relevant experiences. And we're going to break that all down because what they're doing is changing the game of retail.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

This is exciting. So before we get into the world of AI and we're going to make it really scary for people and make it overwhelming and they're going to freak out.

Before we do that, tell us, who is Amanda? What's your origin story? What is up?

Yeah, I run marketing for bloomreach as you mentioned. I would say I've failed enough to be successful and I've been in B2B SaaS for over 20 years at this point and just absolutely love the game.

It's always about trying new things and dealing with big market changes. And we've obviously seen AI is going to totally transform what we do and what our jobs are. So I'm super excited about the next generation.

It's got to be fun to be on, like, the bleeding edge of everything going on.

Working at a company that is trying to leverage AI for the benefit of consumers all over the World as opposed to, hey, we're making some accounting software that's epically boring. Like when you go into work or you log in every day, is it like a party? What are we going to invent today? Is it just awesome?

It is a lot of fun. I have actually worked on the finance side and sold into CFOs and marketed a P2P software actually. And that requires AI too.

But yes, it is a lot more fun. We sell obviously to marketers and heads of E commerce. And so it feels good to know my audience fairly well.

Tell me if I'm wrong. Okay.

When I think about E commerce and AI, I didn't realize this, but when I go, let's say I'm on Shopbop and yes, I go on Shopbop because I buy stuff for my wife, it's okay, maybe they have men's stuff, I don't even know.

But when I go on there and I like search for something and I hit search is the results that are coming up, whether it's shop up or other sites, whatever. Am I seeing the same results as everybody else is seeing? Is AI doing something behind the scenes? Is that what we mean by AI and E commerce?

Yeah, AI is really everywhere. AI in and of itself is not new, has existed for over 15 years and we started with AI.

And when you think about like marketing automation and you think about ad tech and you think about all the things we heard about Facebook now meta, and you think about what Google does in search and how they deliver Google Ads and keyword association like AI has been a pretty significant part of our lives. But I'd say marketers in particular don't want to talk about it because it's very black box. It didn't make sense, it wasn't relatable.

And I'd say what OpenAI did geniusly was they made it accessible.

So all of a sudden you can, you don't have to be technical, you don't have to understand anything, but you can have a conversation with what you know is a computer that's giving you responses and so experience the power of AI. So all of a sudden what we didn't want to talk about because we didn't understand it is now being demanded.

All of us are being told by our boards, we need a plan from you on how you're going to use AI because while we may not understand the tech, we can see the impact. So I think that's been the biggest shift in AI for us recently.

So are we not aware of as consumers? Is There a lot of our experience that's being powered by AI or the marketing that we're seeing is being fueled by AI.

Give us a little bit behind the curtain of where is the AI actually doing AI stuff.

Yeah, there, there's tons of variations of it. Machine learning is also obviously a subset of AI. And so when you think about like automation, that could fall into the bucket of AI.

But yes, when you, as you were mentioned when you were typing a search query into a BO and sometimes the search completes itself, that's a form of automation or potentially artificial intelligence that we would call a search complete as an example or when you complete a search and listing results, products actually show up on that page. They have to be organized in a catalog, they have to be organized in a matrix.

You're not actually seeing all of the products that are actually available. They have some kind of logic behind how they appear.

In our world, we would call, there'd be some intelligence that would help you boost, meaning bring a product to the top or bury a product obviously, meaning don't show it, which would be based on different rules in, in your business. So those are just some quick examples of how search uses AI to deliver experiences on a website.

Is this for everybody? I get it.

Like for example, the, the company you work at, BloomReach, it's like a market leader and I'm sure you're working with some of the top retailers in the world.

But if I'm, I got my little retail shop, my little e commerce site and I'm selling stuff, I'm doing okay, but I want to, I want to do stuff like what the big players do. How do you use AI if you're not one of the big guys?

Yeah, I mean that this is the great thing also about the latest evolution of AI is it's become super accessible and super affordable in a lot of different ways. And you foundational platforms like Shopify incorporating and embedding AI into just their functionality.

So as a small business owner, maybe you only have 50. I have a good friend who owns a brand called Coast Brands and they do these custom dog leashes and dog collars and she has 50 products total.

It's not going to. You don't need a bunch of intelligence to help you sort through dog leashes and collars at a scale of 50.

But for you to get insights on who your visitors are, what products they prefer, how often they click through a product into a product listing page, how often do they look for more information, how important are reviews? A lot of small business Owners don't necessarily understand all of those things and how to optimize.

And that is where AI is going to tremendously help even small business owners, teams of one, become incredibly more efficient.

And you hear AI. I know I do. And I'm like, in this world, you hear AI and you immediately get, I don't know what that means. I don't know what to do.

Do you find that people just get turned off, they get almost intimidated by AI?

Yeah, I do. I think a lot of it is because at least the joke that I make is marketing hasn't started naming things yet.

And so you hear neural network and you're like, oh my gosh, that's really complicated. And it's not. And you hear multimodal training. So our chief technology officer was explaining this to us, and it was.

He explained it in a very technical way. And then at the end of it, I was like, so basically video and text and images train each other? And he said, yes. And I was like, oh, okay, I get that.

It makes sense. So I do think right now we're in the phase where the techniques are just like blown away by the really the technical prowess of what the.

Of what these tools do. And I think we're already starting to see common language being used to start to explain things that are making it less scary.

But it certainly is right now a little bit scary if you're not digging in and trying to understand.

It's intimidating. It really is. So I'm curious, because you do this for your day job, do you use personally, do you use AI as a regular person? And how do you use AI?

I do.

I actually bought the Google Pixel because their fantastic marketing commercial was talking about their AI photo editor, where you can actually remove people from photos.

And while it doesn't work very often, I did recently go on a trip where someone walked through the middle of me taking a picture and I was able to remove that person effectively.

So that's an example of where AI is really awesome on the user experience side, but there's also, when we're hiring and I need to write a job wreck, I can get a Draft started in ChatGPT, or if I want to crunch some data really quickly, you can import data and get an analysis of it that's directionally pretty accurate because it's able to process and create associations between data so much faster than humans can. Yeah, I think there are just a ton of uses personally as well as professionally.

Now I'm curious about something you last in the last few weeks. Sora came out S O R A Sora AI. And for those of you listening that don't know, this is from OpenAI, the same organization that made ChatGPT.

And this is, it's in like preview mode right now.

It's text to video creation, which means you could write a text prompt the same way you would in ChatGPT and say, make a video of X, Y and Z and we'll turn it into an incredible high definition video. And it's mind blowing. What do you feel about Sora? What? You're part of this whole world. What's going to happen?

Is the entire world going to fall apart?

I don't, I absolutely do not think it's going to fall apart. I do think that what's going to happen is we're going to go back to our roots as marketers of storytelling being our differentiation.

We've definitely benefited from the people who have the better tech stack, who have better technical resources, who better understand data and can connect that data and actually execute will win.

So the bigger teams, bigger development teams and we're definitely entering a space where it's not, that isn't going to be as big of an advantage as it has been. And so it's really going to come back to storytelling and emotion and connection and building relationships and I think it's super exciting.

Yeah, I could only imagine like the E commerce experience, you fast forward in the next few years and you're leveraging people going in and searching on something on an E commerce site and all of a sudden it's creating videos or whatever. I don't know. Is that right?

Yeah, exactly.

We've been talking about right place, right product, right time, right message, like for, I don't even know for how long, at least as long as I've been in the industry. And if we'd made a drinking game out of it, we'd all be alcoholics because we're all just so sick of this message.

But the reason why it's been so difficult is going back to our earlier conversation about how will AI help?

If you think about like the product attributes of the sweater that I'm wearing right now, there's a material component, there's a size component, there's a fabric fit, there's all these things that you need to know and understand about a product in order to really help a consumer understand if they're interested in purchasing that product and building out that database and creating a way for a consumer to interact with that database so that they can be informed about a product to make a purchase and has been an almost impossible thing to do.

And when you think about now what we're going to be able to do with Genai to really enrich that data storage, but create even a conversational way for a consumer to ask questions. Is it like gray or white? Is it fuzzy? Is it made with wool or cotton?

And have this almost discussion with a product expert online, it will absolutely change how we can recommend products and help people buy online.

All right, you're making me feel better because now I don't need to, like, go on the first mission to Mars. Like, I feel like it's going to be okay. And you know what?

I also think that all of us, when we're on any shopping website or doing anything online, think about every step because AI is touching you. You may not even realize it. Or that marketing automation stream email that you get. And it's fascinating as a marketer.

So let's jump into the last segment of this chaotic podcast called since youe Didn't Ask, this is where we talk about nonsense. Now, I may have this completely wrong, but you don't like bees.

It's true. That is true.

And so is this like a major problem? If you see a bee, you're running away or is this a minor problem?

No, it's pretty significant. My son, and it's very irrational. I'm not allergic to bees. I actually don't remember ever being stung by a bee.

I just have this very irrational fear of bees. And my son was a toddler. He's now 20, in college.

But he definitely brings this up because I've told him the story, but he was definitely in diapers and he was in front of me and a bee started flying around me and I unintentionally threw him into a bush and ran inside. So. Yes.

Wow.

Don't stand near me.

Yeah, do not stand near you. That is a horrendous story. Now let me ask you. So my wife, she's very tough and she will. When bees are around.

And what she always tells me to do is just don't move. She goes, don't try to swat it away. Don't run away. Just don't move. And so when a bee comes near me, I freak out and I.

And she starts, what are you doing? You're moving, Are you. Do you fall in the camp of don't you fall in the camp of. Throw people in front of you?

But do you fall in the camp of don't move? Like, where are you in all of this?

Yeah, No, I definitely am running. I did just recently learn though, that if you exhale front, this is from an actual insect person who I don't remember the formal title.

But anyway, if you exhale, they sense the carbon monoxide and they view it as a threat, which is what draws them to you to be aggressive. So now I'm gonna have to not only move but not breathe. And I'm not sure if I can do both of those things.

You're like holding your breath. You'd be like a statue. That'd be amazing. All right. Don't stand near you when there are bees nearby.

But there is something I want to let everybody know about that I will be attending Bloom Reach is putting on and correct me if I'm wrong, this is virtual and it's free. Is that right?

That's right.

This is called the Commerce Experience Summit and this is the event for AI and E commerce and it's free and it's virtual and I want everybody to attend. So tell us a little bit about this event and I'm going to tell everybody how to register.

Yeah, we've got some absolutely amazing sessions from people in the industry. So the former cto, William Sonoma will be one of the speakers. I'll be one of the speakers. Our chief operating officer, Christy Augustine.

We're talking about personalization, AI, E commerce, all of the ways that you can really think about creating not just great experiences, but again, like our board members, our C suite team members are really asking us for strategies on how we're going to use AI to scale. And we hope to give you some tips to be able to do that.

I love this virtual and free bleeding edge stuff. You're going to learn it all. All you have to do to register, you go to jschwetelson.com/AI. That's it.

My full name, J schwaned.comai and free registration will be there for the Bloom Reach Commerce Experience Summit. And when is it?

It's next week, the 27th and 28th.

Of February, right now. So stop listening. Go register. Jschweddelson.com AI this has been amazing. Amanda. Thank you for being here.

We're going to put all the links in the show, notes and everything. You are awesome. You don't like bees? Anything else you want to say?

No, this was great fun. Thanks so much for having me.

Awesome Than again. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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