Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Oh

Joshua Warren  0:06  
all the discussion about how the new things work. They're in this discord that Google's not indexing. And so that's, that's creating the situation where it's not indexed. And it's not structured HTML pages. It's just conversations. But what's really good at conversations is a large language model like ChatGPT. So there are people that are actually connecting their ChatGPT instances into discord. Oh, wow. And using that to basically learn gather the information they need, and replace Google as how they're searching for that information. Wow.

Darin Newbold  0:46  
Good day, everybody.

And once again, welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darin Newbold. And I'm excited to be here with you. And as always my very fun and I'm still trying to figure out the question, I can ask him to determine if he's real, or ChatGPT. Josh Warren, we're so glad to have you.

Joshua Warren  1:03  
Hey, yeah, I'm still working on that plugin where ChatGPT can actually just replace me entirely. And I can just go retire on an island. But it's not there yet. So

Darin Newbold  1:13  
well, all right. We're not off topic, because this is all about commerce. And we're very, very focused on it. But we've got some really, really cool stuff to talk about. So first up on our on the overall list is, you know, really, AI visibility enhancements. E commerce is future today.

Joshua Warren  1:34  
Say I keep trying to make the titles more and more of a tongue twister.

Darin Newbold  1:37  
Exactly. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that. My English lessons will be later this afternoon.

Joshua Warren  1:43  
Hey, but you're working on your poll, I am probably what's thrown you off.

Darin Newbold  1:48  
Totally. All right, back to our regularly scheduled programming, AI visibility. We're going to shorten it AI visibility enhancement, it'll be a ve so AI, visibility enhancement a V. And then the other key piece of this is is what we're calling LL. M, which is the language learning models. So that's like ChatGPT. Yes, the technical name basically for things like ChatGPT. So let me kick it over to you, Josh, because you're the smart one here. And I'm just along for the ride. So first and foremost, LLM ChatGPT decision making, get a start. Yeah,

Joshua Warren  2:22  
I'll dive right in. And really, there's two trends we're going to talk about today, because I see these two trends intersecting. Really now, when I first started thinking about this, I was like, oh, six months from now, these trends are going to intersect. But things are moving faster than that. And so the first trend is that people are using MLMs, and specifically ChatGPT in decision making. So if you're not familiar, and I feel like we should just record this before playback for all of our recent episodes, if you're not familiar, GPT is a large language model. Basically, it's an AI, you can go to open ai.com. And with a free account, even talk to it. And it is a mean Chatbot is not selling away short, but it's an AI that you can converse with that can answer your questions that can do all sorts of stuff for you. And people are already using it for research. And even for decision making. ChatGPT has released some plugins that are currently in I don't even know if they consider it a beta. But it's a very early test. And so one of these plugins, for instance, is with a service called Klarna. And Klarna has lots of data about lots of products that are available for purchase. If you have access to the plugins, you turn on the corner plug in, you can do a search and say something or not not a search, and we'll talk about in a second. But you can have a conversation with ChatGPT. And you can say, I really need to find the most affordable car seat available in the United States that meets US and European safety standards. And AI will go off, it'll talk to that plug in, it'll do some thinking crunch some data, and it'll give you a product and say, Hey, this is the product you should buy.

Darin Newbold  4:02  
Wow. That is That's amazing. I know, I know. The other thing is, is it can also give you multiple products, you say give me the top five, that that are available. So that is fantastic. Well, you mentioned two trends. So tell us about the second trend that

Joshua Warren  4:19  
we have going on. So the the second one is that basically, information is being created and consumed faster and faster than ever before faster than Google and traditional search engines can even keep up with. I have a lot of friends that work at Google. I think Google is going to figure this out. And this isn't like the death of Google type thing which I've seen some people say but I think Google is going to have to pivot a bit and probably put more work into the search side of things and they've had to do in a long time. And that is because there's a lot of information out there that can't be indexed via the traditional means because again, it's changing growing so fast, I think The easiest example is our previous episode right before this one, we talked about a library a system called link chain link chain being a really useful way to integrate with and connect to these API's. While laying chain is so new and moving so fast that when you Google for it, you either don't find anything or you find information that's already out of date. And so what I've been finding is, which is information just from yesterday? Yeah, in some cases, yeah. Just because literally every single day, there are updates to the way link chain works. And this technology is moving so fast that even it's hard to make decisions about for instance, how are you going to store the data you're feeding into your your AI in your AI initiatives or projects in your company? Well, literally every day, new approaches are being invented. And so you Google for that. And it's kind of out of date? Well, what I found that's also kind of interesting is like in the case of laying chain, the answers are on Discord. And if you're not familiar with discord, it actually it started out as basically a way for gamers to talk. It's a think of it as slack for gamers. That's really, basically what it is. But there's a lot of different discord communities that are set up around different software packages now, or different interests, different concepts and for laying chain, all the discussion about how the new things work there in this discord that Google is not indexing. And so that's, that's creating this situation where it's not indexed. And it's not structured HTML pages. It's just conversations. But what's really good at conversations is a large language model like ChatGPT. So there are people that are actually connecting their ChatGPT instances into discord a while and using that to basically learn gather the information they need, and replace Google as how they're searching for that information.

Darin Newbold  6:54  
Wow. That's pretty cool. continues to be justice goes on the scary side. But we'll we'll leave that for another episode. Another time.

Joshua Warren  7:03  
I think even you can just go watch Terminator The Matrix? Yeah, basically, we're all feeding a lot of information into this intelligent machine that keeps getting more and more intelligent. And that never ends badly.

Darin Newbold  7:18  
Yes. Ask anyone in the Sci Fi world, right. All right. So we we've learned about a couple of trends that you wanted to discuss. But that ultimately leads us to this really kind of overall newer concept. And we really want to bring this into the Commerce Today. Audience and that is talking about this AI visibility enhancement AV. Tell us about that. And and what does that mean?

Joshua Warren  7:45  
So to me, AV E is like, SEO, but it's SEO for the AI age and the LLM age. And what I mean by that is, if your products are if these large language models, we'll use ChatGPT as the example because that's what everyone's using right now. If ChatGPT doesn't know that your products exist, when a user asks for a recommendation on a product to buy, your product is never going to be recommended. If it knows that your product exists, but it doesn't have a ton of information about it, maybe it'll be recommended some. But if you really optimize it, you make sure that you've done everything you can to enhance the visibility your products to these API's, then there's a better chance they're going to recommend them when people are searching. Or again, not really searching, but talking to them. And right now, you might be thinking, Oh, this is you know, this is like 5% 2% of the population that is talking to that. Yeah, you know, it's a small slice of the population that's talking to it. It's not a huge market. That's how ecommerce started. That's how the internet started is that was just oh, there's, you know, 2% 3% of these people kind of on the cutting edge that are all of a sudden they want to buy things online. Why would you want to do that and all that. Well, that's kind of happening again, except now it's happening within the world of things like ChatGPT. And where that gets really interesting is when you realize that ChatGPT isn't always just going to be a web interface you have to sign up for it's going to be in our voice assistants, it's going to be in our vehicles, it's going to be I'm sure somehow Apple is already trying to figure out how to get into their glasses that they're working on. Oman, this is where technology is going. And so say five or 10 years from now, if the way people are shopping is by saying hey ChatGPT Buy me a new car seat. And it goes does it wouldn't you like to be one of the first people whose products are recommended when they do that? And

Darin Newbold  9:45  
well yeah, I was just gonna say this is we were discussing before the show. This is like the wild wild west early days of SEO, when you could throw a word into your website and that got you instantly top ranked and and people could find you instantly

Joshua Warren  10:00  
Yeah, we actually had a client we worked with many, many years ago that made, she made millions of dollars, because she had one of the first websites that had handbags in the URL and the domain name. And it was back when you could just have a meta keyword tag that you put handbags in. And then when people searched, and it wasn't even Google, it kind of predated that. But when people searched online about buying handbags, first result and made crazy amounts of money from that there's going to be people making crazy amounts of money off of this nutrient as well.

Darin Newbold  10:32  
Well, all right, that leads us really to my next almost it's a question, when do they need to do it? I mean, what do businesses need to do about this AV e implementation?

Joshua Warren  10:41  
Yeah, so there's already two ways that your products can be fed into ChatGPT. One of those ways is through Klarna, if you're a Klarna customer, and then the other one is if you're Shopify customer, for everybody else, your products aren't even necessarily visible. I've done some tests. And it seems like if your product was on Amazon, in 2021, or 2020, there's a chance that ChatGPT is aware of it. So but otherwise, there's a really good chance that it has no idea that your products even exist, and that's where unless you want to reap lat form a Shopify, which I wouldn't do that just for this, that seems like a lot of work for some of that probably isn't the best approach. But instead, you need to start thinking about how can you make your product data easier for MLMs to access? How can you make them aware of it? How can you feed it into them right now, today, that's through ChatGPT plugins, but ChatGPT plugins, open AI has been very honest about how they can't scale that program fast enough that they're getting more interest for building those plugins and adding them into the interface. And they're, they're still trying to solve that problem. So I think that every business, you need to start thinking about this, you need to start making sure that you have your data stored in a way and ready to go that you could feed it in to an LLM.

Darin Newbold  12:08  
And what would that look like I don't want to.

Joshua Warren  12:11  
And the first thing is kind of cover your basics of product data, just have clean, machine readable, good product data. And if you're an ecommerce retailer out there, you probably already have it well, or you have a good sense that you don't, there's definitely some but you usually know if you have product data problems you usually know and right, it's kind of an area, it's one of those things that will fall into the backlog or the technical debt sometimes. So another good reason to start cleaning that up. But then also beyond that, if you have technical resources, I mentioned laying chain before, laying chain is a very interesting way to not only communicate with all limbs, but to even use LLM to solve some of these problems. So you can actually have your team look at that and start looking at ways to build that into your processes so that you're building this data out. If you're a major brand, big enough that you feel like you can get open AIS attention, you absolutely need to just write a ChatGPT plugin like yesterday, you need to get that done, you need to get it submitted. Because then those brands, it's almost like the early days of mobile apps. And one thing I've mentioned is ChatGPT, you can only select and activate up to three plugins in a session. So for instance, you can turn on the Shopify one, you can turn on the Klarna. One, you can turn on one other. Well, that means that if you if every brand tries to have their own ChatGPT plugin, it's probably not going to work because you can only select three right now. But if you're a brand that's big enough, where you have that name recognition, like if you're Nike, and I'm searching for shoes, I'm probably going to say okay, I'm gonna turn on the Shopify plug in the Klarna plugin, the Nike plugin. So if Nike hasn't already, if you're a Nike guy, maybe maybe maybe new balance, maybe

Darin Newbold  13:59  
whatever, to 20 to 20.

Joshua Warren  14:01  
So if Nike isn't already working on one of these plugins, I would be shocked like them and brands like them absolutely need to have already written one. And then I think otherwise, you just need to keep your ear to the ground around all this. This is evolving very quickly. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about it today is I wanted to start this conversation, because I'm assuming that as an e Commerce Industry, we don't want our blanket recommendation to be go to Shopify, if you want to have your products accessible by ChatGPT. Every single brand can't go out there and create their own separate ChatGPT plugin, because people aren't going to scroll through a list of 1000s of them.

Darin Newbold  14:41  
Well, that's where I want to pause real quick. I was wondering who isn't somebody going to build the Swiss Army knife for plugins that then is the plugin that plugs in every other plug in.

Joshua Warren  14:50  
There's actually some work happening in Lang chain where you can use it to basically say, and it's not with ChatGPT plugins yet and so with Zapier, you But yeah, you can have lengthy chain use, basically tell it, here's all the different Zapier plugins I have now pick the top three that an AI might need while answering this question. Hmm. And so that's the other thing is we may see a future where instead of going to ChatGPT, someone builds shop GPT. And everyone goes there. And it could automatically filter between all these different plugins. So

Darin Newbold  15:25  
who could be the Amazon? Of ChatGPT? Now? Who you heard it here? All right, Amazon, you didn't hear

Joshua Warren  15:34  
it here? Exactly. All right. Well,

Darin Newbold  15:37  
we're, we're about to wrap up. I did want to ask you a quick question. You had mentioned that, that there may be a an example, or something that you'd like to talk about if we had time. So is that something we'd like to touch on real quick? Yeah, I

Joshua Warren  15:52  
actually, I posed this question to GPT. For the newest version, that open AI has the newest AI basically, and said, You're a LLM, tell me as an LLM, if I asked you for recommendations on a product to buy, what is going to influence your decision, and it gave me seven answers. So I think all seven of these are useful things for retailers to think about, I think, for time only be able to cover a couple of them. But we will have some blog articles over on the Creatuity website that dives in further. But first one being, of course, detailed and accurate product information, up to date, product descriptions, specifications features, this and I'm quoting Zoe, I'm quoting GPT, four here, and it says, this helps me better understand the product and determine if it's relevant to my users needs. High quality images and media, that was something I was experimenting earlier, even with kayak has a ChatGPT plugin there a travel service, and it was building out trip itineraries for me. And it was putting some pretty attractive imagery without anything. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. Basically, it says that that will allow me to showcase your product from multiple angles to make it more appealing and easier to recommend to the user. So and then the last one we'll cover today is positive reviews and ratings that MLMs are more likely to prioritize well reviewed products, as they will be perceived as more reliable and trustworthy by users. And you'll notice in that language, there's something interesting. GPT isn't trying to figure out what makes the best recommendation, it's trying to figure out how to make the recommendation that it thinks a consumer will be happiest about. So the way it even says perceived as more reliable and trustworthy by users. And so there's going to be this is why I feel like this is the next field or evolution of the next way. Oh,

Darin Newbold  17:52  
so Yeah, the question I would have is, is it going to be able to tell the difference between the reviews and ratings from real humans? There were other bots that might be. But yeah,

Joshua Warren  18:03  
there's definitely a bot war on now of trying to detect bot generating content than trying to beat the detectors back and forth.

Darin Newbold  18:12  
Oh, my Wait, as we as we wrap up. Today, this this Commerce Today episode definitely wants you to recognize and understand and hear the importance of the AI visibility enhancement, and AV is we're coining it here. Really understanding how important that is. And that this literally is the forefront were tip of the spear on ways that you as a, as a merchant could be in front of others in a really neat way. Anything else you want to add there, Josh,

Joshua Warren  18:47  
just that if you're watching the live stream, on the Creatuity, LinkedIn page, YouTube, Twitter or wherever you found us. I'm gonna go out to all those places and post in the comments the links that will be in the show notes because we have some good links that will go out on the podcast show notes that I think anyone that's watching could also benefit from so I'll get that out later today.

Darin Newbold  19:07  
Excellent. Well, as always, we are so thankful that you are here and joined us today. We really appreciate it. Definitely want to encourage you to subscribe and share our podcast and video. And with that, as always take care and have a great rest of your day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai