Shoptalk is the leading conference for the future of retail, where innovators in the industry discuss the latest trends and must-know topics affecting retail. YesPlz had the opportunity to be a part of the conversation, and is bringing you the latest updates on how retailers are using ChatGPT and AI personalization to transform the customer experience.

The Role of ChatGPT and Its Use Cases 

When asking “where is retail headed?” it’s impossible to ignore the importance of ChatGPT and the role it can potentially play in shaping the customer experience. 

ChatGPT’s use cases are diverse and wide-ranging, including anything from styling tips to creating product descriptions and recommendations.

Every panelist was keen about ChatGPT and excited about the impact it’ll bring. 

However, some pointed out that the speed of its evolution is too fast and scary. With GPT-5 rumored to be released at the end of 2023, it’s no surprise that some are concerned about the impact of such a rapid evolution.

What is the role that ChatGPT should play in fashion retail?

Panelists pointed out the importance of being agile and speedy integration. 

However, some panelists such as Samir Desai, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. emphasized the importance of seeing ChatGPT as a contribution rather than seen as another tactic. 

“New tech such as ChatGPT shouldn’t be a tactic but a contribution to funnel conversion.” We agree with him. By harnessing scenarios that help shoppers and utilizing the tech to contribute to helping, ChatGPT can be even more effective. 

Lisa Collier, Chief Product Officer from Under Armour, also echoed the importance of developing a scenario first. For Under Armour, fostering the relationship with young athletes is important and they can definitely see ChatGPT being utilized to enhance the relationship with them. 

AI’s power and its use cases was another conversation we saw among retailers. 

Among the panelists, we resonated the most with Seemantini Godbole, EVP, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Lowe's. 

Her view on using AI to remove frictions was a perfect marriage of AI and retail. 

For instance, when a shopper comes to a Lowe’s store with a broken dishwasher, the shopper is asked routine questions about her dishwasher’s brand, model, make year, and the name of the broken part, and so on. This process is repetitive and can be handled by AI, removing the friction for shoppers. 

ChatGPT could provide the customer’s full information to the sales person at Lowe’s, making the shopping experience frictionless.

Are you curious about more use cases for ChatGPT? Check out “6 Ideas to Use ChatGPT For Fashion Retail”

AI-Powered Personalization to Improve Shopper Experience

Another session that stood out to use was “Achieving Personalization at Scale,” a talk that focused on extending personalization through every customer touchpoint while uitlizing diverse technologies. 

Who hasn’t heard of ‘personalization’ for better eCommerce experience at this point in 2023? 

Unfortunately, the reality is that the lofty promises of personalization still haven’t been realized. 

Personalization requires high operation costs, such as gathering data and a lot of computing power to process them. 

Shelly Kapoor Collins, Partner, Sway Ventures pointed out that wouldn’t be the case any longer. 

ChatGPT and generative AI do a great job at reducing the operation cost, as well as automating labor in a very efficient way. The end result? The hurdle to personalization is about to be lifted.

Furthermore, this technology is not only available to large size of companies, but is also accessible to any size business. Brick and mortar stores are going to be expected to be fully digitized and fully equipped with personalization. 

Amanda Bopp, VP, North America Marketing, at Kate Spade, shared many interesting examples of personalization and generative AI use cases. 

Kate Spade is now able to customize messages, such as email and website copy, according to the user’s segment. An e-mail about a product return can now be written in a customized style,  whether it’s “a-matter-of-fact” style or “emotionally empathetic” style. They also support voice assistance to get personalized styling for their shoppers.

Scott Friend, Partner, Bain Capital Ventures warned retailers who were trying to build the entire tech stack. 

Technology is important and can empower innovation.

Often, successful retailers are not the ones who built everything out of scratch, rather they are the ones who can quickly integrate different solutions, test to find what works for them, and optimize the solution to perfect the user experience.

A retailer can also learn a great deal working with tech partners.

This resonated with YesPlz AI, as we’ve seen retailers that greatly benefited from working with YesPlz to quickly scale their AI product discovery, rather than try to build internally. 

ChatGPT for Fashion News:

YesPlz AI launched ChatGPT Fashion Stylist, which helps online fashion retailers create their own ChatGPT fashion stylist using their product catalog. 

A shopper can now casually chat with an AI fashion stylist to ask ‘What should I wear today?”, “What’s the trending streetwear these days?”, or “An outfit suggestion for my date? 

Shoppers get personalized fashion styling recommendations from ChatGPT for any type of fashion inquiry, then YesPlz AI matches the recommendations to products from a retailer's catalog based on image tagging and fashion transformer we have built. 

If you want to integrate your product catalog to ChatGPT, schedule a demo today.

 Schedule a demo today.