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Editorial

Harnessing AI: Top Use Cases for Digital Commerce

4 minute read
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By Ant Duffin
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Advances in AI, especially ChatGPT, offer new opportunities for digital marketing leaders to drive growth and operational efficiencies in digital commerce.

The Gist

  • AI innovation. AI for marketers offers new opportunities in digital commerce, especially personalization and automation.
  • Operational growth. AI in digital marketing enhances efficiency, unlocking operational growth and freeing up resources.
  • Content exploration. Generative AI, like ChatGPT, opens a world of content generation possibilities, aiding personalization and execution.

For digital commerce, AI adoption is nothing new. It’s been pivotal in digital commerce operations for several years, particularly for personalization and back-office operations.

However, advances in AI for marketers, especially ChatGPT, offer new opportunities for digital marketing leaders to drive growth and operational efficiencies. It’s important for leaders to keep their ear to the ground when it comes to new AI use cases for digital commerce that can unlock growth opportunities or address operational challenges.

According to Gartner research, 60% of marketing leaders are exploring or piloting AI across four key areas: making predictions, improving targeting, automating execution and optimizing the use of resources.

Here are the three most exciting AI digital commerce use cases and how they can support each of the aforementioned operational goals.

AI Digital Commerce for Marketers Use Case #1: Personalization

The first use case is personalization, which is one of the most mature use cases in terms of adoption. There are three areas where AI plays a critical role in personalization:

  1. Personalized discovery, using first-party data to personalize search and navigation.
  2. AI-driven product recommendations that drive sales through cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
  3. AI-powered conversational commerce, using chatbots to drive customer engagement, guided selling and recommendations for customers.

AI is ubiquitous in personalization as a critical enabler of real-time customer experience delivery across the customer journey. The impact of AI can be measured in:

  • Commercial growth based on increased conversion and customer lifetime value.
  • Customer experience improvements to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  • Operational efficiencies by optimizing resource allocation through the automation of personalization activities such as segmentation and campaign execution.

Related Article: 5 AI Analytics Trends for CX Personalization

AI Digital Commerce for Marketers Use Case #2: Automation

The second key use case of AI for marketers is automation, which enables digital marketing leaders to unlock operational efficiencies. AI can be used to drive end-to-end digital commerce operations.

Learning Opportunities

Here, AI can be used to support automated marketing, performance marketing and retail media networks by auto-optimizing targeting and media investments to maximize return on investment. It can also optimize the digital shelf, boosting product content quality to improve organic search visibility and sales conversion. AI can also support real-time automated merchandising, which leads to increased conversion and higher basket value.

Although automation implicitly enables growth through customer acquisition and retention, the main benefit is freeing up resources from mundane repetitive tasks. Many organizations face constant pressures to do more with less, AI-driven automation can act as a co-pilot to free up time for resources to focus on other value-added activities.

Related Article: How Is AI Changing Digital Transformation?

AI Digital Commerce for Marketers Use Case #3: Content Generation

The emergence of generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT has opened up a world of new opportunities when it comes to content generation, which many marketing leaders are already beginning to explore.

By 2025, Gartner predicts that 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated. Generative AI has huge potential in terms of its ability to efficiently generate language and image-based content, enabling marketing teams to shift their focus to more strategic activities. AI’s content generation abilities can also be deployed to support use cases 1 and 2, particularly personalization.

Related Article: Why Marketers Should Stop Worrying and Embrace AI in Content Marketing

How to Get Started in Digital Commerce AI

With endless technologies and potential use cases to explore, it can be difficult to know how to get started with AI. Start by:

  1. Establishing AI governance for digital commerce: Manage and monitor AI use cases being deployed, collaborating with relevant stakeholders such as IT and legal. If governance already exists, integrate commerce AI into the existing structure.
  2. Identify the top three use cases or tactics based on ROI: Focus on the use cases that could bring the greatest return in terms of growth and operational efficiencies.
  3. Pilot and scale the No. 1 ROI-generating use case: Focus on the tactic with the greatest potential impact. If successful, expand into other opportunities.

Explore AI for marketers as a way to drive digital commerce growth and efficiency. Cross-functional governance is a crucial component that must not be overlooked. It must be established or integrated with digital commerce AI to ensure effective management, scaling and monitoring.

While the opportunities available can seem overwhelming, it’s important to prioritize and pilot those with the greatest potential to holistically improve digital commerce.

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About the Author

Ant Duffin

Ant Duffin is a Sr Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, covering digital commerce and business transformation across the end-to-end value chain including digital marketing, routes-to-market and business capabilities (People, Process and Technology). Connect with Ant Duffin:

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