EP046 7 Unexpected AI Tools for Ecommerce Managers to Use Today
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[00:00:00] Darin Newbold: Alrighty, and welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darren Newbold, and this is my wonderful, awesome sidekick, Josh, and we are excited to be here to share a little bit about what's going on in Commerce Today. And a port and safety note for today, uh, I want to let everyone know that this is the real Josh.

[00:00:22] This is not an AI bot Josh, because we are talking a little bit about AI. And that happens to be seven unexpected AI tools for e commerce managers. That they can use today. So Josh, we've got seven of them. Number one on the list. Sounds really cool. 

[00:00:38] Joshua Warren: So, Tell us about it. Yeah. Well, first, I guess this is why you keep insisting we record in person is you're making sure I'm a real human.

[00:00:44] So I have to work on my Android replacement as well. Absolutely. But yeah, so our first up today, um, Is a tool called AnswerThePublic, uh, AnswerThePublic. 

[00:00:53] uh, answer the public. com 

[00:00:55] as always links in the show notes. So if you don't know what to say, and you're going to see these next three kind of build together, but you're like, Hey, I need to create some marketing content for my brand.

[00:01:04] I don't know what to say, go to answerthepublic.com And it actually uses a combination of data from different search engines and an AI engine to actually give you basically what the. Public's looking for, like what questions do people have that you can answer in your marketing content? Um, the theory being then it's super easy to, rank on keywords that people are actually searching for.

[00:01:28] Wow. 

[00:01:29] Darin Newbold: All right. So first up, social media is taken care of. We got some answers next. We gotta have some video to go with this. So tell 

[00:01:38] Joshua Warren: us about number two. Yeah. So HeyGen, and that's G E N. 

[00:01:43] Hey, Jen dot com. 

[00:01:45] So you can basically go in and take a two minute video like I could take one of these videos and it will actually create an AI avatar that looks like me, sounds like me, talks like me, uh, moves just like me.

[00:01:59] Um, so then, you know, you just take your text from ChatGPT that you've generated based on what AnswerThePublic told you you should be talking about and you have automated having a Video of yourself talking about a subject where you're not in the room, you didn't record the video, you didn't even necessarily come up with the text.

[00:02:20] Darin Newbold: So, uh, so next time, Josh, when we do these show notes, we need to put the movie. That this is the replica of that goes with this, the, each of these, cause I can, you know, iRobot's in here somewhere. Oh yeah. Oh, I think it's number three. You're pretty close. Yeah. Now we get into the real video. The other one was scary audio.

[00:02:37] That's identical. 

[00:02:38] Joshua Warren: So now the video, well, Hayden does video as well, but what vid yo does, um, And video such a unique name. There's actually two companies out there named video. So today we're talking about vidyo.ai 

[00:02:51] 2023-11-01 14-45-41: Um, 

[00:02:53] Joshua Warren: it can take that video content, say you just created with Haygen, a zoom meeting, a webinar, whatever.

[00:02:59] And it can generate clips out of that for you. So it can basically go through and say, here's the most interesting clips from your video content. Now you have your reels. Now you have your TikTok posts. Now you have everything you need, um, for those short form videos. Wow. 

[00:03:15] Darin Newbold: And, you know, the combo platter is all three of these.

[00:03:18] So it's the trifecta. Because you have your social media, you have it sound just like you, and then now you've got the video to go with it. Yep, 

[00:03:25] Joshua Warren: yep. Well, and we're going to talk a little bit about, um, some of the, the downsides or risks at the end of the episode. Um, but I will say, like this, this to me is. I don't want to say the best of AI, but a a lot of people say, Oh, AI is coming for our jobs.

[00:03:41] You know, if it can create video and content, why do you need content creators anymore? Why do you need people like me and Darin anymore? Um, 

[00:03:51] but. This, in 

[00:03:53] in an ideal world, you're using it to amplify. So, you know, what used to take you 40 hours a week, maybe you can do it in 20 hours, and now you can start exploring some of those other marketing channels, some of those other ecommerce efforts that you wanted to explore before but didn't have the time for.

[00:04:07] So, that's kind of how I see those first three items, is like, hopefully use those as amplification and you don't just blindly post whatever the AI says to post. So 

[00:04:17] Darin Newbold: use your powers for good folks, important safety tip. All right, moving on. Number four, this one's a little different because now we're kind of moving into more of the, uh, In the computer, chatting, texting, right?

[00:04:30] Is that right? Yeah, and more 

[00:04:31] Joshua Warren: into, using it to augment your ability for strategic thinking. So, um, this is a plug in for the note making app Obsidian. It's called the ChatStream plug in. Um, it's a GitHub module. You can also just install it through Obsidian's community plug in interface. Search for ChatStream.

[00:04:51] Um, if you're not familiar with Obsidian, Let me try to it's a note making app. It has a feature called a canvas and really a canvas is almost like a digital whiteboard or a digital mind map where you can kind of have all your notes. You can spread them around on the screen. You can add snippets of text. You can draw links and connections between them.

[00:05:10] Well, what the chat stream plugin does is throw chat GPT into that. So you can actually say, okay, I've connected all these different notes. Now I'm going to generate a new connection at the bottom and give chat GPT a prompt and say, you know, analyzing all of the, this information, summarize my company's performance for 2023 and the top 3 things I should look at planning for 2024.

[00:05:34] And it will actually generate a response that it adds into that canvas. Wow. And the fun thing with that is then you just go back and forth and you're brainstorming with chat GPT. And you can tell it, you know, you can pull another notes. You can create new notes. You can then take what it says, turn that into a note, um, and now you have basically a mind map, but it's not just your mind.

[00:05:54] It's also 

[00:05:55] Darin Newbold: the AI. Oh my goodness. And, and folks, just in case you're wondering, because I know Josh does this. He also takes all the notes that he takes about me and our conversations and does this exact same thing. So, yeah, it's, uh, it's a little crazy. All right, hanging right in there. Let's keep on going. Ah, here from, from, uh, from ourselves right here, Creatuity, the AI content generator module.

[00:06:18] Joshua Warren: Tell us about that one. Yeah, so that was one that, um, marketing did not name. It is the Creatuity AI content generator module for Magento. So. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Um, this is an open source module. Um, if you, depending on when you click the links, um, it may not be available to the public yet, it should go live.

[00:06:38] I think before this episode goes out. Um, but for those watching live, you can't. Find it yet. Um, and what it does is for anyone that's using Magento or Adobe Commerce, you install this module, you add an open AI API key, and then you can use AI to generate all your product descriptions and to generate your SEO metadata for your products.

[00:06:59] we added a few things to it that Other tools don't have, for instance, it doesn't generate just one description. It can generate three and let you decide which one you like best. Oh, that's handy. and it can't, none of these plugins work directly with PageBuilder yet. So if you're using PageBuilder, we've actually built a way that you can just still easily copy and paste it into your PageBuilder content.

[00:07:23] And a big difference is ours is free. And a lot of these are 50 bucks, 100 bucks, that sort of thing. So we decided to open source that and throw a little bit of AI innovation into the Magento open source world. That is 

[00:07:35] Darin Newbold: awesome. That, that's gotta be a huge time saver for, uh, for my commerce managers.

[00:07:41] Well, all right. So this one, the next, or number six here on our list is... looks like more of an assistant. So to kind of help you out with several different things. Is that yeah, 

[00:07:53] Joshua Warren: that's what it's looking like here? So it's a tool. Originally it was called tavern. Now it's called Noah, but it's still by tavern because it's at tavern art, but they spell tavern weird.

[00:08:02] So just look in the show notes. 

[00:08:05] so 

[00:08:05] what Noah does is it connects to Google drive. It connects to notion. It connects to a lot of different places where you might be storing a lot of data about your company. So all your different, um, Product descriptions. It could be your e commerce strategy for the year, whatever those documents are connects all of that.

[00:08:21] You can ask it then to, um, you can ask it questions where you basically can say, Hey, what's, you know, in our strategic plan, what are the three things that are mentioned? Basics like that. You can also say, summarize this for me. It can even write an email for you based on all those documents. Um, it's basically just a big time saver.

[00:08:40] If you're a most e commerce managers, I know have a lot. In docs and a lot in spreadsheets. And so tying it into a program like this this is another one that can really amplify and save you some time. Very handy. 

[00:08:53] Darin Newbold: Very handy. Well, as we, as we put it all together, number seven on our list. So, you know, hey, we already have great search.

[00:09:01] I mean, Google has all the answers, right? But no, we have Searchy. So, what's, up? what's 

[00:09:06] Searchy 

[00:09:07] Joshua Warren: about? Yeah, searchy.io So, this one's kind of fun. Um, if you have educational content, which I really encourage, any ecommerce brand, you, you should build out educational content. It's obviously really good for SEO.

[00:09:20] It's also good for just... Getting your customers to stick around. If you're the expert in your industry, they're going to be more likely to buy from you. So you don't already have educational video content. You need to be creating it now with that content that you either have or have just created, you plug that into searchy and searchy can pull in content from just about anywhere.

[00:09:40] So you can go to Google drive, zoom, all the usual places. It pulls it in, it transcribes it all. And then you can then basically with just a few clicks create either, um, digital courses or you could create a subscription membership site where if you subscribe, then you get access to all this great educational content and people can go in it basically trains an AI model around your content.

[00:10:05] So we take all these wonderful podcast episodes we've done, we put them in a searchie, then you could actually sit down and ask it questions and say, what would Josh think about. And it will answer and try to answer with what it thinks I would say based on what I've said in the podcast. So what you're 

[00:10:22] Darin Newbold: saying here is, is now nobody has a reason to call us, Josh.

[00:10:24] Really? You gave them that? 

[00:10:26] Joshua Warren: on the show? Well, that's why it's going to be a membership for us that for the low, low price of 99 a month. Right. 

[00:10:34] Darin Newbold: Right. We'll send you 10 Gen 2 cutting knives. Anyway. All right. Back to our regularly scheduled, uh, programming. All right, those were our seven. We had everything from social media, we've got the, the audio that sounds exactly like you then bringing in the video, we've got our own Creatuity one, we've got some obsidian and and kind of a text based uh, solution, we've got an assistant and then the search program.

[00:11:01] But bringing it all, kind of uh, wrap it all up, there's always a little bit of a caution because I know you're You're a glass half full when it comes to AI, And some people can use it for the 

[00:11:12] Joshua Warren: dark side. Oh, This is very true. Um, so, yeah, there's a lot and Like anything you read in the news, take it with a grain of salt if it's super positive or super negative.

[00:11:21] So, you know, I don't think AI is here to kill us all, at least not yet. I don't think we're in a Terminator sort of situation. Um, but I did see a really good, um, presentation actually at Meet Magento New York, um, just a few weeks ago, um, by a guy named Talesh, um, whose company is Bit79. We'll have links in the show notes.

[00:11:41] um, so he's involved in the OWASP, which is the, Open Worldwide Application Security Project. They've changed the name a few times. That's the new and updated shiny one. Um, and that's basically just a non profit group that is looking out for web and application security. And they have added a focus now on AI.

[00:12:01] And so OWASP is known for publishing kind of the top ten security challenges for the web. Um, they're now doing something similar for AI. And one of the biggest things I learned from kind of their materials and from what Tilesh presented is the idea of human in the loop. And basically what that means, and that can be formal or informal, but that means that somewhere in the process of utilizing these AI tools, There's got to be a human and a human has to basically have veto power before things go live.

[00:12:32] Um, and I say that could be formal or informal. And what I mean by that is you could literally, like with our tool that we built that module, it's just a simple thing of, hey, you look at the output. If you don't like the output, don't use it. Like, don't click save. Um, on a more formal side, if you're building out some sort of automation or tool.

[00:12:51] Then there are actually services out there. Um, and I don't know, Amazon's changed the name of this a few times, basically Amazon has a service that, um, Contractors can go to and you can just pose very simple questions and it goes to human and they answer that question, do that task, that sort of thing.

[00:13:08] Well, you can tie something like that into your AI workflow where basically Um, as your AI does something, you can say, okay, I want it sent to 5 different Contractors who can very quickly say thumbs up or thumbs down. And so that's just another way to have kind of that human in the loop as you scale some of these AI efforts.

[00:13:27] But definitely think that, um, even thinking back a year ago to our, an AI episode we did back then when I was a little more negative about AI, it still requires a human, it's not to the point where you can just let it go crazy. So. Definitely keep that in mind. 

[00:13:43] Darin Newbold: When was the last time you watched iRobot?

[00:13:45] Joshua Warren: Just wondering. I need to go back and watch it. We need to have commerce today at the movies, Exactly. 

[00:13:50] Darin Newbold: Yeah, so, um, I love that. Human in the loop. That, that makes a lot of sense and it's at least, uh, it's at least a way. to keep the human involved. Well, folks, we really appreciate you, joining us here today at Commerce Today.

[00:14:06] We're excited about these, AI tools. Definitely take a look at them in their show notes. Grab them, use them, let us know how they work. If they don't work, whatever happens, we want to know. We'd love to hear from you. And, as always, take care, have a great rest of your day. And, we'll see you next time on Commerce Today.