AI is Evolving E-Commerce Content Management
In an Amazon.com-dominated landscape, a retailer’s success hinges on the quality of its e-commerce experience and the degree of personalization it provides.
Effective content management is the key to that personalization — and artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to evolve it in a big way. The integration of AI into content management systems (CMS) is part of a larger wave that, as Gartner projects, will see AI become ubiquitous across new software products within the next two years. AI can be the key to better content management for retailers looking to stand apart — but only if they approach it strategically.
AI: A CMS Game Changer
Over the past few years, the “Amazon Effect” has redefined the retail customer experience, creating a new standard of customization. As customers interact with Amazon platforms, the platforms deploy deep learning to drive personalized product recommendations and serve up deals alongside them. For retailers, the Amazon Effect has made e-commerce the new proving ground. Many haven’t made the cut. Those that have realize that their CMS is the key to differentiating customer experience. And now, AI is on the cusp of fundamentally evolving the CMS landscape.
There are a few key areas where AI will have a marked and positive impact on content management in the near term:
- Image tagging: Currently, industry-leading CMS providers are already using well-performing application program interfaces (APIs) to help eliminate the need for cumbersome image tagging. However, as AI for CMS evolves, companies will be able to deploy it to automate and augment increasingly sophisticated tasks, such as mining content tags to drive perception analysis. Among leading CMS providers, work is already underway to use AI to provide content creators with an idea of how their content will be perceived.
- Audience segmentation: AI’s role in this area has the ability to be transformative. Currently, e-commerce audience segmentation is a time-intensive, manual process that involves defining distinct user personas and creating journey maps based on those personas. AI will help bring not only automation, but also a higher level of granularity to the segmentation process. By deploying an AI-driven CMS, retailers will be able to create sophisticated segmentation that accounts for common customer behaviors like audience hopping — e.g., a young man buys a gift online for his great aunt, thereby deviating from his persona. The reality is that people are more than their segment, and AI will be able to process and account for the fluidity of audience hopping.
- Improved testing: When it comes to designing a personalized experience for the end user, you won’t always hit the mark on the first try. But AI can play a significant role in improving continuous testing that creates a better experience. By integrating AI, CMS providers will be able to pinpoint areas of suboptimal engagement and use analytics to automatically adjust the experience.
As CMS providers continue to make inroads in AI, retailers will have a range of solution providers to choose from. When it comes to integrating a solution, retailers should prioritize flexibility, seeking out CMS providers that offer an intuitive user interface and the ability to easily integrate with other applications.
The more user-friendly and flexible a platform, the more effective it will be in empowering intelligent management. By identifying a flexible platform like this, retailers will be able to limit the manual work of tagging, segmentation and testing, while laying the groundwork for a more personalized and engaged customer experience.
Jan Haderka is the chief technology officer at Magnolia CMS, a flexible Java CMS platform.
