Every day is different in the world of digital, and last month proved to be more of the same! The frequency of announcements coming out about a new "revolutionary" product or service leveraging AI has been non-stop...but sometimes the reality actually does meet the hype.
OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, demonstrated a new voice-based chat which pushes the boundaries into the future envisioned by the Spike Jonze film Her in 2013 -- check out this recording of the demo on YouTube. It's hard to describe how much of a leap forward this is from the still impressive but definitely limited text-based chatting of AI bots. Ultimately it's a bit unsettling, but in some ways, we've been used to hyper-realistic "fake" stimuli for a long time, if you consider special effects and 3D generated worlds proliferating movies and TV. As a society, we've been fine with it as long as it clearly serves a purpose (in this case, entertainment) but we become uneasy if it goes in a direction that we do not yet know.
If you listen to a lot of music, you may already be getting used to the soothing voice of Spotify's AI-driven DJ "X", and it won't be the last faceless avatar we form some level of emotional attachment to. The question in our minds is, from an e-commerce perspective, where and when is the inflection point where you stop emailing customer service, and instead can have a personal shopper talk with you about what your needs are, or help you out in real-time? Is it far off, or is that corner we're rounding getting closer? Does it look different from ordering by phone back in the mail-order catalog days?
"Conversational commerce" is a term that has, to date, covered email and SMS marketing for e-commerce, but it may need to be expanded to include actual conversations with AI. These changes in the core capabilities of consumer-grade technology may in fact alter what we think of as an online shopping experience, what a brand interaction is, and how we approach the decision making process when considering new purchases.
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