Why Brands Must Use Customer Experience to Train AI Shopping Assistants

Personal shoppers are no longer reserved for the luxury consumer thanks to artificial intelligence. What was once the realm of exclusivity is now entering the everyday shopping experience — with AI assistants poised to transform industries and create new opportunities for businesses and consumers alike.

AI can manage your schedule, make appointments, write emails and gather information from a range of online sources all in a matter of seconds. And now a new AI is emerging — the shopping assistant that helps you find a whole new wardrobe for a change of season or the perfect outfit for a special event.

Through the power of AI, shoppers can receive personalized recommendations from across the web in no time at all. Say you need a dress for an upcoming gala, you could ask AI to pull a list of the "10 best black satin dresses for under $500," and you instantly save hours of scouring the web.

If you’re in a rush, you can get granular and ask AI for "affordable men’s suit for a summer wedding, available with same-day shipping or in-store pickup." In the time it takes you to type the request, you have a full list of options in your price range, with summertime fabrics, ready to order and pick up at a store near you.

This sounds like a great opportunity for brands, but is it? If AI is essentially browsing and shopping for consumers, how can brands maintain a connection with customers?

If You Know How Customers Shop for Your Brand, AI Will Too

You might think you understand how customers view your brand and how it shows up in their lives, but the reality could be very different. To get a better understanding of how customers truly perceive your brand, your business strategy needs to be driven by the customers you’re trying to reach — i.e., you need to get inside the mind of your customers when they’re shopping for the products you sell. How do they search for items online? What kind of language do they use? What words or phrases do they type into search engines? This is the information that AI assistants rely on to include products in their search results.

These are also the insights that help you drive a connection with your customers. When you understand how they shop and why they choose your brand over other similar or competing products, you also learn what's most important to them about your brand. This information allows you to change online product descriptions accordingly.

These product descriptions become pivotal in directing AI shopping assistants towards your brand as they generate suggestions for users based on those descriptions as well as your other online content. If this content doesn't align with what customers most value or seek first from your brand, you’ll have a hard time connecting with them through AI. But if you take a customer-driven approach and update content to reflect what consumers are truly looking for, you can harness the power of AI-assisted search tools to your brand’s advantage.

Create a Content Strategy Around Customer Experience

An AI shopping assistant will learn a consumer's personal preferences for brand, style, fit, color and so on. The more someone uses the assistant, the more it gets to know them and the more tailored its recommendations become. All of this creates a hyperpersonalized experience, which is ordinarily the zenith of customer experience. However, it comes with risk.

By homing in on tailored recommendations, AI has the potential to pigeonhole customers by offering fewer opportunities to explore new styles and trends. This could lead to monotonous experiences with both style and brand, which is a turnoff. So, how can brands address this issue?

By creating brand experiences offline that generate the right brand content online. In-person events, announcements, press coverage, shows and brand ambassador engagement are all crucial elements of a truly 360-degree content strategy.

Think of it this way: the more opportunities you give people to engage with your brand offline, the more they will talk about it online — especially if they're bloggers, influencers or journalists. This is the content that AI shopping assistants pull from to curate their recommendations. Therefore, it’s essential that you do all you can to shape this content in line with the way customers search and shop for your products.

Train Modern Tech by Staying True to Your Brand

An effective 360-degree content strategy draws from your brand heritage — specifically the reasons customers first chose your brand, even before AI was a thing. By focusing on the way your brand shows up for customers in the real world, you also create a platform to showcase the breadth and variety of your brand offering.

For example, your strategy could include events to showcase new collections or pop-up shops to connect with both new and existing customers, all of which builds brand awareness and creates the desired online buzz that AI can pull from.

When your content strategy incorporates the story of your brand at every stage of a customer’s buying journey — and by blending in-person events with content across different online channels — you keep your brand front of mind for both customers and AI so you can harness the full potential promised by AI shopping assistants.

Manfred Abraham is the CEO of Yonder, a business consultancy.