By Cyril Dorogan, Chief Commercial Officer at Gepard
In this article, I will investigate how AI assists PIM solutions in advancing smart automation, personification, and operational cost reduction in eCommerce within the evolution of the PIM market.
We are all aware that the world is evolving and things will no longer be the same as they were in the past. The Fourth Industrial Revolution which brought the rise of artificial intelligence, has caused a considerable change in the eCommerce business, particularly with regard to PIM solutions. Let’s examine the potential artificial intelligence creates for the PIM market and how the major market players — solution providers, retailers, and brands — will be impacted by new innovations and competitive advantages.
AI helps to reveal talents and skills deficits by automating repetitive tasks. According to the IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2022, 42% of businesses are investigating the potential uses of artificial intelligence (AI), and 35% are already utilizing it in their operations.
Let’s try to figure out exactly how AI can be most effectively applied in PIM and how it will assist eCommerce enterprises in smart automation, boosting profitability and customer satisfaction.
The data-driven approach to PIM
In today’s highly competitive eCommerce landscape, managing product information efficiently and accurately is critical for the success of online retailers and brands. Internet retailers may now use data-driven strategies to manage product information more efficiently thanks to the advancement of AI, which has traditionally been a manual process. AI has opened up a whole new world of possibilities in the realm of PIM. By delving into the details of PIM, we can identify several areas that are poised to benefit greatly.
AI-powered Copywriting – better-personalized content
AI Copywriting has the potential to revolutionize the way that PIM providers and users create content. AI models are already capable of creating unique content. For example, Stability AI and Midjourney create new images based on text requests. OpenAI’s ChatCPT creates any text, or article structure and answers questions in detail in seconds. With the ability to generate personalized content that includes bullet points, long and short descriptions, and unique SEO-friendly content, AI Copywriting could drastically reduce costs while still producing high-quality, creative marketing campaigns and improving SEO. By investing in a highly qualified copywriter to oversee the AI-generated content, companies can achieve the best of both worlds – cutting expenses while maintaining quality content.
AI-powered Syndication
AI in Syndication has the potential to make data delivery endpoints and data sources more accessible. With automated and faster integration combined with AI-powered unit tests and coding, AI can drastically speed up integrations and establish connections between the PIM system and data sources or data endpoints, making it easier to manage data intake and distribution between different taxonomies. This could lead to higher-quality content becoming the benchmark, further reducing expenses while maintaining high standards. The price of integration decreases, the speed of syndication increases, and the paradigm of focusing on the number of pre-set connections disappear and instead starts focusing on the lighting speed integrations.
AI-powered Mappings
Before the AI era, automated mappings could only be reliable for up to 20% of cases and comparison of attributes was carried out manually in the back office. Now, using a customized taxonomy, AI-powered data mapping can assist in categorizing a lot of product data. Data from multiple sources can be automatically transformed into a standard format that PIM experts have defined. Additionally, AI can recognize mistakes like duplicates or missing values and enhance the quality of the data. Following the previously created data mappings, AI can then automatically fill in the intended destination with these improved and modified data. This would increase the value of quality content as it becomes easier to share between different platforms and data sources. And there will likely be a decrease in its cost, which will result in the establishment of a new market benchmark for content quality in general.
AI-powered Rich content
AI in Content Enrichment has the potential to automatically create rich HTML pages based on available product data and AI-generated unique rich content. It includes Premium A+ and A++, features supporting the High-quality HD images, that impress the visual sense of customers. These images include lifestyle images, high-resolution product images with rich and specific content, product banners, what’s-in-the-box infographics, in-store clickable links, videos, slideshows, product carousels, 360-product views, etc. This could lead to significant cost savings while producing the same high-quality results.
AI-powered Digital shelf analytics
Dispersed information is the key bottleneck for digital analytics, making it challenging to gather and evaluate. The number of data sources has grown quickly. Datasets for products offer millions of different types. As a result, data analysis has developed into a highly complex process that requires highly automated tools to make it workable.
Companies now use the creation of specialized scripts and crawlers for this purpose, which in semi-manual mode (including crawling bots, and customization) examine retailer websites, evaluate the pages, discover the serial number (MPN or EAN codes), and match it with the brand database before conducting the analysis.
AI in Digital Shelf Analytics has powerful possibilities for crawling, parsing, and analyzing brand data and representation on targeted retail platforms. Data collection will be quick and automatic. With real-time analysis of brand data representation, companies can make data-driven decisions to improve their digital shelf presence and optimize their online sales.
Summing Up
Companies nowadays need to adapt to the expanding demand for businesses to optimize the whole information supply chain. They need an IT environment that is highly interconnected with processes and data flows that are constantly improving and accelerating. This drives software vendors to continually enhance their efforts to address these technical issues. Those businesses that invest in AI will dominate the market as PIMs keep integrating AI-powered solutions for copywriting, syndication, mappings, content enrichment, and digital shelf analytics. If this is not done, the solution will cost too much money to solve the same issues.
PIM will probably evolve into a more comprehensive concept that combines fully automated content creation, distribution, and analysis, but at the same time, the reduced cost will make it more widely used and available to most businesses. As a reliable provider of PIM software in the niche, Gepard is dedicated to the development and evolution of its own product and plans to introduce cutting-edge AI technological features shortly.
