Whitney investigates the various AI tools available for live commerce. The episode starts with an overview of the tools she’s been researching and using, including what they are, how they work, and how they can be applied to business, specifically video shopping events. Whitney defines generative AI and large language models before providing examples from OpenAI, Google, and Facebook. Learn about the benefits and drawbacks of using tools such as ChatGPT, Quillbot, Copy.ai, and Jasper. Learn how they can help you save time (and possibly money) when conducting research, developing and executing marketing campaigns, and providing customer service. Learn how to use AI before, during, and after online shopping events. Learn how to improve your work quality, better understand your customers, and collaborate with your team.
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Using AI For Live Video Commerce Success With Whitney Lauritsen
In this episode, I’m on my own. This was the first time I’ve done an episode without anyone from the eStreamly team, including Nicolas, who is at an event. Since I’m on my own, I got to dig into a topic that I find interesting and hopefully one that’ll be useful to you. It’s something that I touched upon fairly briefly in a previous episode with Nicolas and that is the subject of artificial intelligence tools, which we have been seeing develop for many years. I feel like they got into public awareness at the end of 2022. They have been a big topic of conversation in the business spaces, the creative elements, the worlds, and the industries in early 2023 where we are.
I wanted to dive deep into how you can use some of these AI tools for your live eCommerce shopping events, which is the focus of this show as well as eStreamly, the company. I have outlined an overview of AI tools, what they are, and how they work, and provided some examples of how you could apply them to your business specifically with live eCommerce.
Let’s begin with an overview in case you feel a bit confused, and unaware, in fact, even if you feel you understand the basics of AI, maybe you’ve been using some of the tools. ChatGPT is the one that’s been most talked about. There’s still a ton to learn and when I was working on the outline for this episode, I was using AI a little bit and learning through AI about AI. It was an interesting process. In fact, ChatGPT played a big role in that. I also pulled from various articles and books that I’ve been reading, as well as the copy on some of these AI tool websites.
Types Of AI
Overall, I want to help you accomplish how you could save some time and money, improve the quality of your work through these tools and make your workflow faster, more efficient, and less overwhelming. That’s the big thing we’ve seen with live eCommerce since it’s still relatively new in the United States. People that live in this country are trying to think about if it is worth it for them. If so, how do they do it and how do they get through some of the emotional barriers? That’s a big theme of this show, so let’s get into it as much as we possibly can in one episode. Starting with what is artificial intelligence, specifically generative artificial intelligence, this idea was a little foreign to me. I’ve been referring to these tools that I’m going to cover as AI, but there are different types of AI.
Live eCommerce is still relatively new in the United States. People who live in this country are trying to decide if it is worth it for them. Click To TweetGenerative artificial intelligence refers to new types of machine learning algorithms that use existing content like text, audio, video, and images to create completely original content. As I will share a little bit further down, I’ll add now that the term completely original content isn’t always going to be the case because there are concerns around plagiarism. Luckily, there are many ways to work around them.
A lot of these AI tools that I’m referring to are called Large Language Models, which are a type of machine learning that is trained on a large amount of text data such as books, articles, and websites. These can do things like language translation, text summarization, question answering, and text generation. They are helping us feel and become more capable of understanding things. Likewise, the AI itself is being trained to understand and generate human-like text.
Most of this content is text-based, although I’m now starting to look into the video-based tools out there which, to be honest, scare me a little bit. I feel off-put by them and I’ll explain. I’ve dabbled in a couple of recommended by friends in the articles that I’ve read and certainly, that’ll be part of the ideas I will help you generate.
As I mentioned, we’ve heard a lot about ChatGPT. I didn’t know this until I did my research. ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which doesn’t mean much to me as a terminology. This tool is developed by OpenAI. You may have heard of them. They’re responsible for a lot of the AI tools circulating now, at least in terms of the large language model that we’re referring to here. This tool is a transformer-based language model that was trained, as I mentioned, on a diverse range of internet text and it can be fine-tuned for a variety of natural language processing tasks.
You’ll be hearing a lot of this. I don’t fully understand the definition of natural language processing, but to me, it sounds like what it is. That is developing things that sound natural to humans, not just machines versus the difference between something that you can tell was created by a machine. The focus for a lot of people now is that it’s hard to tell the difference between, did a human write this or did an AI tool write this? Although there are some drawbacks, as I mentioned, and it’s not 100% there. I don’t know if it’ll ever be there. That’s part of what I’m studying but don’t have the answer to quite yet.
I also want to mention that there are several tools or platforms that are similar to ChatGPT. To be fair, I’m going to outline some that are mostly based on the same developmental technologies, OpenAI, but beyond OpenAI, there are companies like Google and Facebook that are focused on this and surprisingly, not getting as much buzz, at least not now in early 2023.
For example, I had not heard of any of these tools, at least that I can recall. Maybe I heard of them and ignored them because I didn’t care in the past. One of them is BERT. It’s also a transformer-based language model. In fact, all these examples I’m going to give that parallel ChatGPT are transformer-based language models and BERT was designed for question-answering and sentiment analysis. I imagine that a lot of the features that we see built by Google, such as Google searching are involving this AI.
Google also developed T5 as well as XLNet and ALBERT. Those are different variations of themselves. Some of them were designed to overcome each other’s limitations. Some of them are lite versions. Facebook also has a tool called RoBERTa, although it’s spelled with different capitalizations. These models are pre-trained and can be fine-tuned. That’s what we’re in the process of learning and contributing to. As we use these tools, we’re helping them become better so we’re working together like a partnership.
The Pros And Cons
With all of that deep geeky data out of the way, let’s get into the reason you probably care. First, the pros and the cons of using tools like this. As I mentioned at the beginning, AI can help you save time and money. As business owners, entrepreneurs, creatives, consultants, or whatever you’re coming here to this episode as you want to save time and spend it on things that you love and things that you don’t enjoy.
AI can certainly support you with that without a doubt. It can save you time if you use them. It could save you money because time is money. You might be paying someone or spending a lot of your time on something that could generate more money for you. AI, more or less, can help fix errors. It can review work, especially text-based things, although it can also cause errors because it is AI. It is not a human. You have to be mindful of how you use it. You can’t 100% rely on these AI tools quite yet, but they’re pretty impressive if you haven’t used them.
I also think it’s important to look at people in the technology space that are praising AI, valuing it, excited about it, and see the promise. An example of that is Bill Gates. He has referred to AI as the most exciting field for technological innovation. I found that impressive. Kevin Kelly is another person that I have been looking towards because he has spent decades analyzing technology trends.
I’ve been reading his New York Times bestselling book, The Inevitable, which was written in 2015 or 2016. I was amazed at how accurate his statements about AI were back then. I haven’t studied what he said in 2023. I don’t even know that much about Kevin Kelly. I assume he’s still alive but I could be wrong. I hope he is because he is smart. Some of the key terms or phrases of his AI that I wanted to share with you, which are the chief benefit of AI is that it does not think like humans. This intelligence does not replace human thinking but augments it.
If you think about AI as augmenting you, and again, saving that time plus your team’s time, any collaborators that you’re working with, partners, that is a helpful way to frame it versus people that might be afraid that AI is going to take over their work, put them out of a job, and replace them entirely. I don’t know if we’ll ever get there.
Kevin Kelly has a positive spin on it. Like a computer, for example. That’s not replacing us. Computers are tools that we use together and it’s also helping us digest big data and make sense of it. As I said, I use ChatGPT to help me come up with the framework to answer some of my questions about AI so that I could do this episode. It’s helping me make sense of AI. AI itself is helping me make sense of AI, which is fascinating.
There are some downsides. I want to make sure I mention them. As I mentioned earlier, there is plagiarism, inaccuracy, and potential errors because it doesn’t always have that human touch, which you would give it if you were relying fully on it. For example, a college student or students, in general, in all different age ranges might feel like, “This is the answer. I don’t have to do any work at all. I could tell ChatGPT or one of the other tools I’ll share with you to generate all this text for me. Awesome. I don’t have to do anything.”
That’s not true because AI may be plagiarizing something without you realizing it. You do have to check its work. People are going to become more savvy. Google, for example, is very savvy when AI is being used. I’ve mentioned Google a number of times. You may have heard that ChatGPT or perhaps all of OpenAI, I’m not 100% sure in the moment, was bought by Microsoft to use in their search engine, which is Bing.
It’ll be interesting to see how sophisticated the AI becomes at not only utilizing it for these purposes but also identifying when it’s being utilized in the first place. We have to stay tuned, but that’s a downside because you can’t fully rely on it. Also, quality control. You have to make sure that it’s written in a way that sounds like you, especially in the ways I’m going to suggest for live shopping events. You don’t want it to be robotic.
In fact, one of the most important elements and benefits of doing live video content is that it feels more human. It is more believable and authentic if there are mistakes in it. Humans make mistakes. If AI doesn’t make mistakes, at least in the way that a human would, then it’s not going to feel right. You might have to add mistakes.
One of the most important elements and benefits of doing live video content is that it feels more human. It is more believable and authentic if there are mistakes in it. Click To TweetYou might have to switch around the grammar or the way the sentences are phrased in copywriting, for example, to make it sound like a human being and specifically, to make it sound like you. Otherwise, you’re going to sound like everyone else. That’s the other thing that a lot of people are pointing out. Is AI going to make us all write the same, speak the same, and create the same? I don’t think so, but it’s possible. If everybody’s relying on the exact same tools, in theory, we could all end up sounding the same. In general, you always have an advantage by adding a human touch.
There are biases in AI too. I’ve seen some examples of how AI can come across as a bit racist or inaccurate in terms of the facts that it’s sharing and making statements that might not be true or might be biased. It does not understand the world it talks about. As somebody said in my research, because AI lacks a fundamental amount of comprehension about the world, it is a machine. It’s not a human. It does not see or understand things the way that we do as human beings.
It also is limited by the data that it’s referencing. As I mentioned, how AI machine learning is working, they’re being trained by certain amounts of data such as books, articles, and websites. It’s limited to that. Our brains store a lot more than just what’s written down. You could see that reflected in the output that it gives. Despite these downsides, it’s still incredibly impressive.
AI Tools
I’m going to share with you some of the AI tools that I’ve been using myself and/or researching, and then I’ll get into some of the ways that you can apply them to your business specifically for live shopping. I’ve mentioned ChatGPT and OpenAI a number of times. Also, I’m not 100% sure which tools are powered by OpenAI, although it seems to be the trend right now.
A lot of these tools I’m about to list off are similar to each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if most or all of them are based on OpenAI, which again, gives it a limitation. They might seem like different tools but operate about the same as one another. Jasper is a tool similar to ChatGPT in a lot of ways, but specifically about creating content for your blog, social media, and website. There’s Copy.AI which does similar things. I’ve been using Copy.AI for a few years and found it limited and now all of a sudden, perhaps it’s because I better understand how to use AI. It seems incredible.
As I’m mentioning these tools, they’re all displayed differently. Maybe they are all built on a similar or the same framework, but the user experience is a bit different. ChatGPT for example, especially now, I believe, is still in beta form. It feels basic. You have to know what to ask it to do. Whereas tools like Jasper, Copy.AI, Rytr, as well as QuillBot all have different prompting sections that you can go into to augment your language.
For example, QuillBott has a paraphraser. You can go in there and it’ll rephrase your text in a variety of ways to improve your fluency and make sure that you have the appropriate vocabulary and tone. QuillBot is one of my favorites. It has a grammar checker and a summarizer in it, and you can do most, if not all of these things, in ChatGPT, but you need to know how to ask the questions where some of these tools are giving you more specific containers and guidance towards getting the answers.
In a sense, some of those tools are limited because of that. A great example is Ellie. It’s an advanced text-based AI that is trained to reply to emails, and I’m almost 100% sure it’s developed on OpenAI. I was excited about this tool because replying to emails is one of the biggest things I struggle with, but it had so many limitations. I haven’t quite gotten to where I want to be yet. It’s still developing. It’s a brand-new tool. It came out maybe at the end of 2022 and it feels a little too contained. Whereas when I went into ChatGPT, I was able to get better results even though ChatGPT isn’t just about writing emails if that makes sense.
Another tool that I am slowly starting to experiment with is the Notion AI tool, which is neat if you’re a Notion user like myself. In fact, I did the whole outline for this episode in Notion. I don’t think I use any of their AI tools during that because I am not used to it yet. It’s so new that I’m used to taking text, copying it, and pasting it into ChatGPT, QuillBot, Copy.AI, etc. Whereas Notion is now developing where you can stay within that document and do your AI changes right there without going somewhere else.
Some of these tools like QuillBot have extensions, so they’ll work in platforms like Chrome and even Microsoft Word, which is neat. You can see why Microsoft decided to buy it. Rytr is what I imagine Jasper is like. I haven’t been able to use Jasper yet because their signup process has a lot of bugs. For example, I was trying to create a new account and I never got the verification text that I had to enter. It’s buggy. I then tried a previous time and they had different texts about how long their free trials were.
Speaking of which, some of these tools are free right now, but very well could change in the future. There’s a lot of buzz around ChatGPT charging and some people have even said it might be prohibitively expensive, whatever that means. There are tools like QuillBot that are freemium, meaning they’re free with premium features that you need to pay for. You’ll only get a small percentage of their features until you need to upgrade or there’s a character count, for example. It seems like Jasper is different. They give you a free trial then you have to pay. Take note of that. Depending on your budget, you can use most of these tools at least on a lighter version of them. Notion seems to be free. That’s good news if you’re already a Notion user.
I mentioned in the previous episode where I summarize briefly my thoughts and experiences about AI. Descript is a tool that we use here at eStreamly, mostly for the show right now. We edit the show in Descript and also make social clips there. It’s great. I’m going to talk more about social clips momentarily, but Descript uses AI to automatically transcribe your video into tech. Perhaps all instant “generation” happens in an AI-type tool.
Zoom, for example, uses live captions that are probably built on AI. There are some video platforms that are interesting, speaking of social media. One is called Big Room AI, which I’ve checked out. I would love to use it, but it doesn’t quite function the way I need it to. It’s worth looking into if you’re somebody who is recording videos with multiple people in them because it can take a wide shot.
The production world uses the wide shot, which means it’s a distant shot of oftentimes multiple people in some space. A tool like Big Room AI can go in, make clips, zoom in on, or crop into one person at a time, and cut back and forth between them. That’s neat. I don’t shoot videos like that right now. I haven’t been able to use it.
Another tool I have not used and the one I said scared me a little is the avatar-based AI tool. I was reading about Synthesia. It’s animating a human-like avatar automatically and it can convert text to this talking head video, which might be handy for you while you’re making content. I don’t know if you’d want to use that with live video, nor if you could for sure, especially if you’re using a tool like eStreamly. We don’t have that built-in, at least not yet. It could be helpful right now. It’ll be more helpful in the future. If you watch these videos, it’s a little strange because it looks like a human, but it doesn’t talk like a human. I’m put off by it, to be honest, but also open-minded and willing to watch it adapt over time.
There is one other similar tool I came across, which is D-ID Creative Reality™ Studio. It can make these nice-looking videos. It’s using the GPT-3 text generation to help you write your script, which is neat. It’s giving a human face to communication and learning videos if you do not have the time, bandwidth, or interest in developing them in more traditional production ways. You can use AI to still get there in your own way, thus it makes it affordable and saves time.
Business Applications For Using AI
Let’s dive into some specific business applications for using AI. I’ve touched upon some of them, but I’m going to go break it down piece by piece so you can think through using these tools. Essentially, I think of these AI tools as having a virtual assistant that is saving you that time. Something that would take you a lot of time to do, but you don’t want to spend your time doing. You’re getting results sometimes within seconds versus if you were to go do it a different way, it might take you 30 minutes, an hour, etc.
Number one is brainstorming and generating ideas. A lot of video content or eCommerce development starts with that. Even when you start your company, you need to brainstorm the concept of it. If you’re thinking of the name for your company or a name for a product that requires a generation of different ideas. For one of my podcasts, I came up with 200 different titles for the show and that took me hours and hours.
I cannot tell you how much I wish I had access to or knew about AI back then. It would’ve saved me a lot. You can use AI to brainstorm ways to say things. For example, there’s a prompt recommended for ChatGPT based around explaining a complex topic to a five-year-old, and that could help you brainstorm how to say something. You might want to figure out how to do a demo. Especially if you’re using live video, you might want to have an outline for what you’re going to talk about when, and how you’re going to do that. That starts with brainstorming.
You could brainstorm interview questions if you have guests in your live videos. You could brainstorm and generate ideas for engagement, which is a huge part of live content. Whether it’s a live poll, maybe you’re running a contest or a game, and you don’t know what to do. You know that you want to do something, but the specifics are where you struggle. AI can help you figure that out. Even how to put together a training or a workshop on your products, which is great for live video, that can all be put together and thought through using these AI tools.
When you want to do something, but the specifics are where you struggle, AI can help you figure that out. Click To TweetThat leads me nicely to the second way AI can help you, which is by doing research. Sometimes brainstorming and idea generation is done through doing some research. Maybe you’re trying to decide what products to make, or if you already have a bunch of different products, you’re trying to figure out what products should you highlight in your live videos and in what order. You could do market research and demographic research using AI to find out all sorts of details.
Essentially, these tools work a little like a search engine, and thus it makes sense why Microsoft wants to integrate them into Bing. It makes sense why Google and Facebook have their own AI. They are collecting a lot of data and I’d add that to the downsides of AI. People are concerned about privacy, and you do need to keep this in mind.
A caveat to do your brainstorming and your research, if it is proprietary, you don’t want other people to be using your ideas. You should be cautious about using AI because we don’t 100% know what is generating for you is shared with other people. There are a lot of concerns around that. I would be mindful of what prompts you type in and how much information you’re giving to AI during your research and brainstorming. It feels like a good time to mention that.
If you want to keep it a little bit more general, you can still get a great amount of data that’s beneficial to you. You can search for all sorts of relevant information for your business. You can start your research there and then go off. Sometimes we don’t even know where to begin. What sources should we trust? You can ask AI to give you a list of platforms to check out, so that way, you’re not starting from scratch. Maybe you want to build a domain name. You can even generate domain names on these platforms.
Again, be mindful. Sometimes people are afraid that searching for domain names gives ideas to the web and that somebody might steal your domain. I don’t know how often that happens, but be mindful. You could analyze things. This jumps a little ahead, but if you’ve already done some live shopping events or you already collected data about your audience, you could use AI to help you analyze engagement and behavior, give you insights, etc.
Also, when you’re doing research, a huge help is summarizing things. Let’s say you have a long article that you don’t have time to read or maybe you already did read it but you need to summarize it, AI can help you with that. It’s the same thing with books. All of these things can be truly beneficial to developing your business, starting your business, and creating content within that, specifically around live videos. I have some ideas, and then I’m going to get into tips for marketing, sales, and customer service.
I’ve already touched upon general video content and if you want to do something using an AI-generated avatar. Again, I don’t know how well that would work in live shopping. I haven’t seen it done yet myself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see that more. That leads me to one of the biggest things we’ve noticed at eStreamly that people struggle with, which is hosting. Deciding whether or not you as a business owner, as a business team member or an employee are going to be the host or are you going to hire someone outside of your company or your team to do that work for you.
This is a common question, and you could start by asking AI to help you develop clear communication strategies, giving you advice on things like body language and voice inflection, learning effective techniques for capturing the audience’s attention, and also how to overcome your fears. That’s one of the biggest reasons people don’t like to public speak. They’re afraid of something. You can ask AI for essentially coaching as a host. If you yourself are not going to be the host, you can have AI help coach somebody else that you’re going to have to do it for you.
The same thing can be done with sales in general. You can ask AI to show you how to be a better salesperson and create things like your CTAs or Call To Actions. You could ask AI to show you how it would market something, how it would add value, and convince somebody to buy something. This is essential for copywriting, which I’m going to get more into the marketing section, but also the copywriting for your live video outline. If you want to do a script or practice something, learning how sales and psychology work is something AI can help you with, and it can certainly develop an outline for your segments for your whole video.
AI can even help you troubleshoot. Have you ever gone to Google and used it to help you figure out how to fix your camera, your audio, or your computer? Why not do it in AI? As I mentioned, a lot of these tools act like search engines, but much faster. You can go in, provide the issue, and the technical problem, and ask AI to help you solve it. I love that because the technical challenges that people fear or face when doing live shopping videos are commonplace, especially when you’re brand new to it. Use AI for that.
There are some AI tools that are likely in development. We may see them more in the future or they’re already happening behind the scenes depending on how you’re doing eCommerce. Ways in which you can think about AI is by using it for comment moderation. It can detect and flag inappropriate or offensive content or comments in real time which could save you from hiring a moderator, for example.
We don’t have that as far as over at eStreamly, but maybe we will in the future. Things like automatic captioning, as I mentioned, can be great, which can make it accessible to a wider audience. You can use chatbots, which can even handle transactions during your live events. Maybe they start watching a video, or live shopping event at eStreamly, but then they go to your website later or during your live event and you have a chatbot set up to help that. That is certainly in place now. I’m going to talk more about customer service in terms of using the chatbot in a bit.
AI in general can assist with fraud detection. It can analyze data and identify suspicious activity in real time, and it can even check your inventory, which is important during a live shopping event. Our hope is that you sell out but that can be stressful sometimes. You want to make sure that your inventory is in a good place. AI could help by automatically tracking your sales and updating product availability in real time so that there’s not an issue. You might need to do that work on your own website. There are plenty of tools that already exist for that. You might not have thought about that.
Marketing
Let’s talk about marketing. I’ve touched upon this a lot, but let’s dive in a little bit more specifically in terms of how you market your live event before it happens. You want people to come and watch you live. You want your potential customers to be there, and you also may want to repurpose your content after you go live, which a lot of people do. You should be doing both. Marketing should be part of the entire plan, but a lot of people are intimidated by marketing and afraid it’s going to cost a lot or take a lot of time.
There are ways in which AI can help with that big time. One of the simplest, most commonplace elements of AI tools is writing emails, scripts, and social media content. They can help you write catchy subject lines to boost your open rates, help you find keywords around a specific topic to boost SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and even help write meta descriptions for your blog posts on the web. As I mentioned, it can help simplify complex topics, which could help you think through how you’re writing in general. Maybe your articles or blog posts are a little too specific or a little too niche or just complex. You can put it through AI.
One of the simplest and most common elements of AI tools is writing emails, scripts, and social media content. Click To TweetQuillBot is a great example. There’s a simple feature in there where it will take your writing and make it easier to read. I talked about summarizing things. If you want to put a summary at the top of a blog post or at the summary of your live video, I do summaries for every episode, and I use AI now to take the transcript and summarize it so it’s boosted for SEO. It’s easier for you to understand without having to read the entire transcript.
AI can even help you think of new ideas. if you’re running out of topics to do for your live videos, use AI. Go back to that brainstorming element like I said. Even if you need placeholder text, AI can be useful for that, especially when you’re thinking through the marketing elements of your website, your landing page copy, and maybe even writing a business plan for yourself. AI can help with anything written. That’s probably what it does best now.
You can do all sorts of attention-grabbing titles for your live videos. That’s a huge part of marketing. People want to know what your live event is going to be about and why they should be there. Your title says a lot. A lot of people when they do live events have bullet points. In this live event, you will learn 3 to 5 points. Again, you can summarize the outline that you have. Maybe you put that outline into AI and it generates those 3 to 5 bullet points for you.
There are also the core elements of marketing that not every business has in place, and by business, I don’t just mean as a company. If you are a content creator or a team member who is trying to think about how you can support the marketing efforts of a company you’re partnered with, it’s helpful to have a campaign in mind.
I mentioned things like demographics research, but AI can also help with developing key messages and slogans that reach them, even deciding which media channels like social media channels or platforms you want to promote on. Also, help you think of things you might not have ever thought of by asking AI to help you develop a marketing campaign, which it can do. ChatGPT, for instance, is great. I believe also Copy.AI has similar tools there.
Also, writing ads. If you’re thinking about running ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, or any of these platforms, you might not know what to say. What do you put in the video? What’s your script? There’s a great example of Ryan Reynolds who owns the company Mint Mobile. He used ChatGPT in January 2023 to generate a script for his commercial, which is an ad, and it came out so well. If you haven’t seen it yet, do a search or maybe even ask ChatGPT to show the video of Ryan Reynolds using ChatGPT. I’m assuming it’ll give you a link. If not, Google will easily help you with that.
You can write social media captions. Copy.AI comes to mind. They’ve done a lovely job with this. They have a section called Write an Instagram Caption, and it won’t just give you one. It generates a bunch of options. ChatGPT does a little bit of a better job, but you can use the tool in conjunction and also QuillBot. You could start on Copy.AI and ask it to write you a bunch of different captions. They feel as if they don’t have that human touch I was talking about. You could take those captions and put them into QuillBot and then it’ll give you different paraphrased versions of it.
It’s hard to explain. I’m not going to do a whole tutorial on QuillBot in this episode, but if you play around with it, you will see how immensely valuable it is for rewriting what another AI tool did. That’s cool. I mentioned Big Room AI and how it can take a wide video and turn it into a bunch of different vertical videos. That’s what it does. It says it’s automatic. Again, I have not used it yet, but it looks like a cool tool.
Lastly, on the marketing side of things, AI could even help you with influencer marketing. You can ask it to tell you what a successful influencer would do as part of a campaign. You can ask AI to generate ideas for all the different platforms. You can get ideas for how to engage your followers, and then you could hire an influencer marketer once you have that campaign in mind, if that makes sense.
A lot of businesses when they’re working with influencers or content creators don’t know where to start, so they’re leaning entirely on the influencers and content creators but not all influencers and content creators are business savvy. They’re good at creating content and they might have an engaged audience, but some of that is luck. Some of that is on-camera skills.
That doesn’t mean that they can think through brainstorming, market research, and generating a knowledgeable marketing campaign. Why not use AI to come up with the concept and then bring that to an influencer content creator or even a live video host? As mentioned earlier, you could do a whole outline and say, “I need somebody who is good on camera to show up and use this outline.” You’re working together. That’s the ideal.
AI For Customer Service
The last section I want to talk about at least is how to use AI for customer service. I mentioned chatbots a lot. That has been an effect on a lot of different websites. You might even be using it yourself. Live commerce is designed to improve the customer experience through knowledgeable people. You can take your knowledge and put that into a chatbot that answers all of the frequently asked questions. You can make it more quick and painless by using chat, which is faster. You don’t have to be involved with every step.
As human beings, we forget things. We might need a database to go find the answer to something. Why not have a chatbot do that for you? It’s important to keep in mind that one of the key components of live commerce is producing less friction for your customers and making them more likely to purchase. The human touch needs to be involved at some point. This, again, is that partnership.
One of the key components of live commerce is producing less friction for your customers and making them more likely to purchase. The human touch needs to be involved at some point. Click To TweetYou can use AI to create summaries of conversations. Your customer could go in and say, “This is what’s going on.” It could create a summary and then hand it over to you as a human being or the agent that you’re hiring. I see this on platforms like Amazon, where you let the chatbot know what the issue is, it collects as much data as possible, and then it brings it to a human being. That’s a great way to use it.
Chatbots can be designed over time to create a good customer experience, but you have to be involved in training it. It can be your first line of customer support. Again, that might be great because you might not have the bandwidth or the time to answer quickly. A chat could resolve some basic issues much faster than you could.
It could amp your reviews. It could analyze the problems that people are having, specifically with the reviews. Outside of a chatbot, on a platform like Amazon, which is huge for eCommerce or even your own website, you might have reviews built into it. You could take the live chat that happened on a platform like eStreamly and use AI to analyze it.
What was the overall sentiment of what people were saying? What do they seem to be struggling with and how can I use that to improve a future live shopping event? How can I use that to improve my products and services? You’re taking all this data and then putting it into AI to analyze. That’s amazing. That’s going to help you gauge your brand awareness and perception. That might help you come up with testimonials that you want to share on social media. That might help you with the copywriting you want to put on your website into your blog post, your newsletters, and even into your live shopping scripts.
Summary
The best way I could summarize this is you’re taking all of this data and using AI to help you make sense of it. I started off the episode with that and Kevin Kelly, I believe, put it that way. There are so many points of data we have with eCommerce, social media, content creation, and live events. It’s data galore, but what do you do with it? AI can help. I hope this helped you think through all these different tools. You can go back and check out all my recommendations.
In the future, we’re working on behind-the-scenes with eStreamly blog posts for every single episode that is laid out well for you to comprehend everything we share in each episode of the show. Speaking of comprehension, one of my favorite resources that we make at eStreamly is the newsletter. If you haven’t signed up for it yet, you can go to eStreamly.com.
Nicolas, the Cofounder and the Cohost of the show who’s usually here does such a beautiful job with summarizing the top news and information. He sends us out every Friday. It has the most recent episode of the show there and everything you need to know. If you want something a little bit more condensed, you can check that out. A little side note, I often use QuillBot to help with the copy editing of things like the newsletter.
We also have our live community. If you want more of the human touch, if you don’t want the AI experience, if you don’t want everything summarized nicely for you, come join our private community. It is amazing. We have many of our guests there. Nicolas is extremely active. I’m in there sharing tips and resources I come across oftentimes about new tools like AI. You can go in there and collaborate with people and troubleshoot. There’s so much.
We’re trying to build a great resource for you and combine that human touch with technology over at eStreamly. Thank you for reading. I’ll be back with Nicolas next time for another episode of the show. If you haven’t subscribed yet and you want to stay informed, don’t forget to do that too. I’ve given you a number of calls to action, but you can find everything at eStreamly.com in one place and take it from there. Bye for now. Wishing you all the best with AI and your overall live eCommerce experience.
