AI and Amazon

AI has become a bit of a buzzword in the past year or so, hasn’t it? The steady march of Artificial Intelligence into our lives continues, both online and offline, and here at Online Star we’ve been involved in the testing and roll out of it on a number of ecommerce platforms.

With Amazon specifically, AI is being tested for content creation as well as content collation. For collation, you’ll have seen it appearing in the Reviews sections on product pages, as pictured above, but it’s also being tested with creating product listings as well.

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AI is a fascinating area of content creation and evolution, and we’re seeing early attempts to monetise and refine something which is still at the time of writing, really, in the early stages of its journey. It’s moving on at a rapid pace however. From the mere technology of a website chatbot, we have already had personalisation, facial recognition, risk assessment, decision-making, education, social media, the list goes on. As AI continues to develop and evolve, entire industries and vocations stand to be significantly impacted by it. Cast your mind to areas such as healthcare, the legal profession, and even copywriting – on the face of it, what AI could bring to consumers could have a great deal of potential, couldn’t it?

Equally, the scope for AI to disrupt, alter and transform is enormous – representing a very tangible and automated threat to the established status quo in certain sectors. Looking at the cost of legal advice, it could be argued that AI tools which help people to understand their legal position without having to pay thousands and thousands on lawyers’ fees might not be such a bad thing. Turning to other areas of text-based provision, there may be a lot of copywriting out there which could, frankly, be replaced by AI solutions. And if we then look towards healthcare, since the pandemic there has been a heightened interest in researching and understanding medical issues overall, including seeking support, self-determination of symptoms, and remedies.

There have already been areas of impact on some jobs where automation has, essentially, reduced the need for the hands-on human resource. Whilst we are still in the early stages of AI intruding into (or bringing benefit to) many of these areas, it’s our suspicion that there are a great many out there who are secretly in panic at how AI tools could disrupt entire industries. Those industries are certainly not there yet, but there are mumblings within large corporate boardrooms (and over the water cooler) about efficiencies and further evolution of working practices. As consumer habit continues to change, it’s prudent to watch this space.

As early advocates of testing the tech, so to speak, we’re quite excited by some of the areas that AI harbours the potential for. Having been some of the early testers of what AI could do, we see it continuing to evolve all of the time. There is a lot of wariness surrounding it, as not only does it have a lot of potential, but it can also be a very powerful tool. But, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. We’re great believers in the mantra that ‘just because you can, does not necessarily mean that you should’. Like anything, AI, wielded correctly and responsibly can be incredibly beneficial and positive. However, having tested it with product content creation in numerous ways and with numerous platforms, whilst we embrace elements of it, we do not see it as replacing or even rivalling our secret sauce. Used in combination with the experience of product, marketplace and life itself, it has great potential. However, in a similar way to how an editor can make prose better, it is the human overlay added to artificial intelligence which can really make it shine.

Disclaimer – this blog post was written by a human

Image courtesy of Amazon EU Sarl