Join experts Agnes Kubiak (Trend & Design Expert), Christina Stensvaag (Digital Commerce Expert), Jiwon Hong (AI-powered Product Discovery Expert) as they share their thoughts on ChatGPT's role in the fashion industry from both a design/trend and a product-centered perspective. Each week, we'll be sharing a question from our webinar on "ChatGPT & Its Role in the Fashion Industry."

You can find a summary of the webinar here.

This week's question:

What excites you the most about ChatGPT for retail and its impact on personalization? 

Christina: The way I’m thinking about ChatGPT is around utility. Consumer behavior is changeable–think about the blue dot on Google Maps which is taking data in real-time and changing my behavior. And for those who think that product managers are going to be replaced by ChatGPT, I would say not in the same way that a doctor would be replaced by a robot. Somebody who has the qualities of curiosity and tries to understand the applicability of ChatGPT would be a much more powerful practitioner of their craft.

I think ChatGPT is only as good as the information is validated, but in terms of everyday, I see the potential in onsite search, taking massive product catalogs from Nordstrom or Walmart, and making sense of somebody that’s searching for a product, and deliver it in a way that’s much more engaged is a very important use case.

Agnes: For trend forecasters, AI tools can help prepare a new collection. People are always scared of a blank page when starting a new collection, but this can be a starting point. When you are a designer there’s generative AI to help start generating pictures. For trend forecasters, we can ask questions to ChatGPT to start getting answers. And suddenly there’s a picture or text to get you started.

But, as you continue, you notice that you start reaching the limit of ChatGPT or generative images–suddenly answers stop making sense. There are limitations of tools in terms of design (like asking DALL-E to design a dress), so we need to learn how to use the tools: learning how to type the right words. “Intellectual shortcuts” can lead us to the wrong answer if we’re not curious enough. After using ChatGPT every day, it can be difficult to work with these tools because sometimes the result is good but sometimes the result can be disastrous.

Jiwon: I think the potential of new site search experience with ChatGPT is what excites me. Now, there’s more freedom with ChatGPT. We don’t have to search exactly the way that a machine would understand. Because the way that search engines works is that we’ve been trained to search by keywords–but ChatGPT allows us to speak naturally when searching and can still find good search results and recommendations.

Previously, personalization has been a much-discussed topic in the eCommerce industry. However, due to the lack of adequate processing power, personalized shopping experiences have been unsatisfactory. The good news is, with ChatGPT, we now have access to a sophisticated language processing system that can understand natural language and generate highly personalized recommendations. This breakthrough technology will significantly alleviate the challenges of achieving true personalization in eCommerce. I'm thrilled about the endless opportunities this presents, as it opens up infinite possibilities for delivering customized shopping experiences to consumers.

Christina: A practical utility could be customer service. For example, there’s only one way to express an alternative sentence from English into Spanish. When I think about those use cases, the list of applicability goes on and on. As a consumer, imagine getting that translated information just in time and the way that you need it. Going back to the example of using a mapping function, it is possible- we can change consumer behaviors and outcomes through technology. Think of a customer that needs the right information at the right time–it can be really powerful. A blank white page can be daunting but empowering.

For example, I need to create a set of keywords to create these new trend pieces–that’s where I think that the way that we start on that blank page will give us that intellectual shortcut. As a worker that’s in the business of exploring, I think that we will need to have judgment and a barometer of what’s good will factor in–and it’s still yet to be done.

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