Another day in omnichannel retail, another new tool promising to revolutionize the way you operate. However, this one probably is worth your attention. AI-generated product descriptions have the potential to change the way you operate, particularly if you’re already at scale. It’s an emerging technology with limitations, but does have the power to make you more efficient and customer-centric. Want to find out more? Read on.
What are AI-generated product descriptions?
Let’s quickly define AI-generated. In this case, it’s text that is created by a large learning model – the one that’s most famous right now is ChatGPT. You ask it to write things for you, and it does. That’s the simple entry point anyway, there’s a bunch of tweaking and refinement involved in getting it to produce ‘good’ content, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
The idea behind having AI assistance is the same here as it is elsewhere, spend less time on the labor-intensive and often dull tasks so that you can do things that really matter. If you run a business that sells thousands of products that are slight variations of one another, like a hardware store for instance, many of your product descriptions will be nearly identical, so why spend hours and hours repeating description copy?
Benefits of AI-generated product descriptions
As we’ve just alluded to there are some key benefits to calling on AI to assist you with generating production descriptions. Starting with the most important first:
Efficiency and Scalability
The key benefit of AI-generated product descriptions is the remarkable efficiency they offer. Retailers with big inventories can generate thousands of product descriptions seriously quickly, which means there’s a lot less lag involved in uploading a product and getting it to generate revenue for your business. Also, your team can spend less time churning out almost copy-paste descriptions and have the process largely automated, saving a big chunk of time on a boring job.
Consistency and Accuracy
AI has the potential to deliver extremely consistent tone and style across all product descriptions, maintaining your brand voice and reducing the likelihood of errors of typos and other copy errors. This consistency is crucial for retailers who aim to build a strong, recognizable brand image across multiple channels.
Personalization and SEO Enhancement
AI tools can tailor product descriptions to different segments of your target audience, potentially enhancing customer engagement. Also, with the right input, these descriptions can be optimized for search engines, helping you to increase the visibility of your products in search results and driving more traffic to your site – something every online retailer is always desperate for.
Drawbacks of AI-generated Product Descriptions
Before you go deciding this is exactly the tech you need right now and shoehorning it into your business, AI generation is not without its drawbacks:
Model inconsistency
This is all pretty new tech that people are having to grapple with. As smart as ChatGPT appears, it can very easily get confused and deliver misinformation that can be missed unless you’re paying close attention. All of these models will evolve and improve over time, but right now, they’re far from perfect.
Lack of human touch
While AI can excel in generating technically accurate descriptions, it currently lacks the creative flair or imagination of a human writer. This could lead to descriptions that, while informative, may not truly capture the unique appeal of a product. Basically, it’s very product dependent.
Learning curve
While your team might hate having to write product descriptions at scale, they might be just as frustrated learning how to get good output from text-generating AI models. Arguably worth the time investment, it’s definitely not a straight line to understanding how it all works in a working environment.
Best Practices for Using AI-generated Product Descriptions
To get the most out of AI support, in whatever form it takes for your business, there are some key best practices you should follow:
Human oversight
To get around the limitations of AI, it's incredibly important to keep an eye on its output. It might seem counterintuitive to the idea of efficiency and freeing up time, but you need a trusted person to make sure what it’s creating is actually correct.
Regularly review performance
Right now, there are lots of free options for accessing generative AI, which means you can test and see if in principle it’s actually going to offer significant time and effort savings in your business. If it isn’t, wait till the models catch up.
Will they work in your business?
AI-generated product descriptions represent a key tool for those omnichannel retail operators who want to find a better way to operate, but who are also willing to spend the time to learn how to use the tools. Efficiency and consistency, at scale, are possible for AI-generated product descriptions, but only with a realistic plan of how to implement it over time. So the very short answer is: “Yes, they can work in your business”. It’s just up to you whether they actually do.
AI generation isn’t the only game-changing tech out there for omnichannel retailers. Heard of ORP? You really don’t want to miss it. Get in touch with Wolfpack today to find out more.