Generative AI: The Conversational Revolution is Reshaping E-Commerce

Generative artificial intelligence isn't a trend, but rather a profound global paradigm shift in the conversational universe.

The more than 100 million Open AI users signifies a record-breaking adoption rate in the tech industry. AI experts agree that while this isn't a technological revolution in its own right, it’s definitely an adoption one. For the first time, adoption is consumer-driven rather than being pushed by businesses or driven by economic goals.

Its numerous and varied capabilities create the necessary "wow" effect that spurs massive and rapid adoption. Generative AI will forever change our professional lives and ways of working by augmenting our capabilities. It’s already a game-changer in the conversational space, impacting the roles of agents right now. Generative AI holds the promise of enhancing our creativity and efficiency, revolutionizing problem-solving and multitasking. It will allow us to reimagine existing systems and foster a new culture of innovation.

Faced with this revolution, giants of the digital world have engaged in fierce competition, repositioning their strategic investments and making generative AI their top priority.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

However, this frantic race shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of fundamental issues and objectives, such as the accuracy of the information delivered and the security and confidentiality of our data. With millions of people interacting with them daily, the limitations of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI are quickly becoming apparent, encouraging greater regulation.

Early this year, we experimented with ChatGPT’s ability to answer real customer pre-sales questions based on real product information and knowledge agents have access to. In 80 percent of the cases, the answers provided by the generative AI model were correct, and 10 percent of the time they were even better than what was initially provided by the agent. However, in the remaining 10 percent of instances, the answers were highly problematic, providing false information. In these instances, the answers were a result of the infamous "hallucination" inherent to the model that’s designed to statistically generate an answer regardless of its correctness. Risk can also be very high regarding customer data privacy, as demonstrated recently with major data leak issues due to information shared with large models.

In other words, LLMs, as stand-alone models, are not business ready for customer-facing conversational interactions. Businesses need trusted generative AI apps that use and protect private data while harnessing LLMs to deliver 10x productivity.

The Promise of AI for Conversational Commerce is Already Here

To build trust in generative AI in the e-commerce sector and generate large-scale online conversions from your pre-sales strategy, it's essential to address three key challenges.

First, AI must be connected to a brand or retailer’s enterprise ecosystem. Generative AI is powerful technology, but its full potential and reliability are only realized by connecting it to the organization's knowledge base and data to deliver highly accurate and personalized experiences.

Second, it’s imperative that AI complies with internal and external legislation and regulations governing e-commerce businesses. In particular, that it can guarantee the confidentiality of customer data.

Third, it’s essential to control the AI with advanced monitoring and analysis tools that track and improve the user experience. These also help optimize sales performance and cost effectiveness.

AI as an Innovation Accelerator

Today, only 1.6 percent of customer interactions worldwide are automated with AI. When connectivity, compliance, and control are pillars of the AI implementation process, generative AI tools can revolutionize online commerce. It will streamline digital conversations and enable brands to serve their customers in new, innovative ways.

Early tests reveal the massive potential of generative AI for e-commerce. Results of using generative AI-powered tools in customer conversations are showing an impressive level of satisfaction that’s equivalent to human-managed conversations — 70 percent CSAT and 19 percent conversion rate, to be specific. Generative AI's ability to manage these experiences on an unprecedented scale makes us wonder about the future of conversational commerce and its economic impact.

Will the human element disappear from the equation? Definitely not! Instead, the role of customer service representatives will shift to becoming holistic experts augmented by generative AI, responsible for overseeing and improving AI-generated responses. Humans will still play an essential part in this process, helping to constantly monitor and refine AI models, interacting with virtual assistants themselves to gain efficiency and guarantee a seamless, trustworthy experience for the consumer.

The world's biggest brands have become conversational, and their large-scale conversational revolution is happening now.

Julien Hervouët is the CEO at iAdvize, a conversational platform offering generative AI services.