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Are you struggling to keep up with the pace of digital change, or the very concept of digital transformation?
Do you find it challenging to integrate new technologies into your marketing strategy while maintaining a human touch? And how do you effectively use the data you’re collecting without feeling overwhelmed by its volume and complexity? These are some of the common pains businesses face when navigating digital transformation.
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The good news is that AI can help transform these challenges into opportunities, offering powerful solutions to streamline processes, enhance customer experiences, and make smarter, data-driven decisions. But how exactly can AI be a catalyst in your digital transformation journey?
To help us explore this topic, we’re joined by Sharon Gai, a leading expert in e-commerce and digital transformation. Sharon brings a wealth of knowledge from her extensive career and thought leadership at platforms like TEDx and Singularity University. She’ll share actionable insights on how AI can help businesses not only overcome their digital transformation hurdles but turn them into growth opportunities.
AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Sharon Gai about:
✨ Overcoming Challenges with AI: Understand how AI can help businesses overcome the common hurdles in digital transformation.
✨ Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Learn about real-world examples where AI has transformed challenges into opportunities.
✨ Future Trends in Digital Transformation: Discover emerging AI technologies and trends that will shape the future of digital transformation.
Learn more about Sharon Gai
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Transcript
(lightly edited)
AI as a Catalyst: Turning Digital Transformation Challenges into Opportunities with Sharon Gai
(00:00:00) Sharon Gai: And just a lot of disruption, I think, is seen in the market. Because from my Alibaba time, I worked with a lot of very large brands, very traditional brands, who would have hundreds of people in their e commerce scene to organize everything. And then on the other side, you have these very small, sometimes they’re very young, sometimes they have no background in e commerce whatsoever, but they had a vision, they had this idea of this type of brand that they want to start. And then from listening to podcasts like this one, you know, gaining all of that knowledge from these different places, they’re able to really learn really quickly and piece something together and have a result.
And so I think that’s at least the challenge that I see from the traditional side, and I think there’s a lot of companies that are being that there’s a lot of new entrants, and if I don’t learn fast enough or if I can’t catch up, Then somebody else will be able to accomplish something faster than me.
(00:00:59) Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode will break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.
Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.
Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked where I’ve selfishly used this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. And you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.
Now, listen, are you struggling to keep up with the pace of digital change? Do you find it challenging to integrate new technologies into your marketing strategy while maintaining a human touch? And how do you effectively use data you’re collecting Without feeling overwhelmed by its volume and complexity.
These are some of the common pains businesses face when navigating technology, particularly e commerce. The good news is that AI can help transform these challenges into opportunities, offering powerful solutions to streamline processes, enhance customer experiences, and make smarter data driven decisions.
But how exactly can AI be a catalyst in your technology and e commerce journey to help us explore this topic? We’re joined by Sharon Gay, a leading expert in e commerce and digital transformation, Sharon brings a wealth of knowledge from her extensive career and thought leadership at platforms like TEDx and Singularity University, she’ll share actual insights on how AI can help businesses, not only overcome their technology and e commerce hurdles, but turn them into growth opportunities.
Hey, Sharon, welcome to the show.
(00:02:55) Sharon Gai: Hi, Mike. It’s so great to be here.(00:02:58) Mike Allton: Thank you so much. Could you start by just sharing your journey and what led you to focus on e commerce and AI?(00:03:05) Sharon Gai: All right. I’ll tell you the exact night. And it was at nighttime that AI really played a huge role in my role. As a category manager back when I was working in T mall.
So T mall on, but no, it’s not. To a lot of people, especially people in the e commerce space is the Amazon of China. It’s owned by Alibaba. It’s actually roughly three X the size, which in terms of GMB to Amazon, just because of the sheer population size in China. And it’s also a much more complex platform.
Because I then moved over to working with working in the Amazon side. So I got a good comparative view of how both entities work. Okay. And back to my night of AI discovery though, is there’s this thing called double 11, if you ever heard of that. So it’s a massive sales campaign that’s in China.
It’s very similar to the black Friday campaign. So if you’re an e commerce person, you’ll know that black Friday is the time that you pay attention to every small detail, because that’s usually most where, when most of your sales will happen. But in the China side, it’s at double 11 or we call it November 11th and I was PMing this campaign for my team.
And then I was called in at like 11 PM that night. We were all ready to go, but we were called in to go into this, what we call this, War room that’s when things get really serious. And the and I can go into details of why that particular year was especially prominent for us because it was the rise of this company called Pinduoduo, which you might have heard of because Pinduoduo is the mother company of Pinduoduo.
Timu and Timu is chasing us around in the World Wide Web today and it’s really changing e commerce in the US as well. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a very disruptive Chinese player. But that night we had this, and this was the year 2018 also. So that night we were pulled in and usually for these campaigns, we all manage hundreds of brands and each brands has hundreds of SKUs.
So per category manager, we’re all managing hundreds of thousands of SKUs that we have to ensure is being rightly presented in campaign pages. We’re maximizing the ways that we can showcase this product so that we hit our GMV target so that the overall platform hits its GMV target and. Usually every double 11, we set very aggressive targets.
It’s usually double or triple digit growth rates for depending on the category that you’re in. And it’s a lot of work also on the side of the e commerce sellers, because You know, they not only are they running their stores and making sure that it’s looking beautiful for all this traffic that’s about to come in, but also they have to deal with internal things like so all of these CPG brands have their, you know, they, they all produce certain things so that they can make sure that their supply chain is okay during this time, because usually when the order spike your factory or wherever you’re getting this product from.
Better catch up to those orders. So there’s a billion things they’re managing. There’s a billion things we are managing. And so we’re called to this, this meeting. And in, in terms of also these campaigns, it’s very taxing for design teams because they have to create these images that’s suitable for this campaign.
It usually has this double 11 banner on it and there it’s, it’s on sale. So there’s a lot of sort of promotional. Sort of that banners and also just backgrounds will change. And so we’re, we’re pulled in this room and there’s this tool where instead of changing the background per photo, we can use prompts to batch change all backgrounds or to pair this sort of really beautiful background image to the product with just a sentence.
Thanks. And that was the moment that our, that I, that I thought that our lives would be changing from an, from an e commerce manager standpoint that we no longer have to do and coordinate a lot of these different tasks, but that there’s a lot of things that you could just let an AI take over and run for you.
And. You know, you’re, you’re writing this prompt, go get a cup of coffee, you’re busy with other things. And that thing is just running in the background and doing these things for you. So that was the first day that, that where I jumped into this field. And of course with a lot of the things that is changing in the back end, in terms of how we match customers, The right customer to the right product.
That was also always there, there were so many different things that we were doing to tag certain products so that it would be discovered and the way that people search. And that was, that was the first day that that, that became my start in this e-commerce and AI journey.
(00:08:10) Mike Allton: That’s, that’s terrific.
First of all, my wife is from Hong Kong and her family is from mainland China. So we, we’ve, we’ve talked a lot about the differences of shopping and the apps are available there. They’re not here, that sort of thing. So I’m very familiar with what you’re talking about. And it’s really amazing that you’ve had that kind of experience.
I love that you shared that. Story because it’s very typical. I think for what a lot of marketers have either experienced or I want them to experience, which is that aha moment of, wow, this is really amazing. And I can see how AI in this instance can apply to the work that I’m doing. It’s like, it’s a common thread that we talk about on this show a lot.
Or what are some examples and how do I visualize it? Because it’s not. A tool like Canva that’s designed to create images. It’s a technology. It’s an underpinning or underlayer right to everything that we’re doing. But I also want to tap into your obviously vast experience with e commerce. I wonder if you could share just in general challenges that you see e commerce marketers facing today, whether they’re a I or not related.
(00:09:10) Sharon Gai: Yeah, I think if you work in e commerce today, The biggest challenge I think is just, it’s becoming more and more competitive and there’s more and more channels that are happening. So I also run a podcast called the B2B Breakthrough where I interview a lot of e commerce sellers. Some of them are starting off some and seen amazing success.
Some of them are eight to nine figure sellers on Amazon or elsewhere. And what I hear from them is it’s just, So easy to get started in the e commerce space these days. And because there are so many AI tools available to you, whether it’s helping you design a logo, whether it’s writing copy for that product detail page, whether it’s changing the background for a product image very easily.
There’s a lot of newcomers jumping in and I mean, there are 14 year olds that starting their first t shirt business or sweatshirt business that has this sort of gen alpha twist. You know, I don’t know if you’re into the those, those viral videos where the millennial says a word. And then the gen alpha says, actually in our generation, it’s called this.
But like a lot of people are starting sort of brands that have their own twists to them. And just a lot of disruption I think is seen in the market because from my Alibaba time, I worked with a lot of large, very large brands, very traditional brands who would. You know, have hundreds of people on their e commerce team to, to organize everything.
And then on the other side, you have these very small, sometimes they’re very young. Sometimes they have no background in e commerce whatsoever, but they had a vision. They had a dream. They had this idea of this type of brand they, they want to start. And then from listening to podcasts like this one you know, gaining all of that knowledge from these different places are able to really learn really quickly and piece something together.
And have results. And so I think that’s at least the challenge that I see from the traditional side, and I think there’s a lot of companies that are struggling with that. Seeing that there’s a lot of new entrance and if I don’t learn fast enough, or if I can’t catch up, then somebody else will be able to accomplish something faster than me.
(00:11:31) Mike Allton: So if I’m one of these traditional retail and e commerce brands, and I totally understand the problem. I have a whole nother podcast. It’s all about retail marketing. We’ve, we’ve talked to people like Feednomics and how they can help. Brands differentiate their products and that sort of thing, depending on the platform they’re pushing to.
And that gets harder and harder every year as more and more platforms. But to your point, we’ve got more and more competitors rising every single day. How can AI help me if I’m a traditional retailer? Or an e commerce giant with that kind of an issue.
(00:12:02) Sharon Gai: Yeah. So I think there’s a lot of, I I’m also a keynote speaker too.
And I, and I go on different talks. So one of my slides I always have is what in your role is something that you can start to outsource to an AI agent or an AI tool? The encouragement is to take your one job that you have. In whether it’s a marketing manager, whether it’s an e commerce manager, merchandise manager, CRM, life cycle, marketing, whatever role you have and you chop it up and you literally list out every single task that takes up time.
And you might have a a total of. 50 or so tasks that happens Monday to Friday, and then you start to group tasks together. So which of these tasks are very repetitive and which of them are very time time consuming. Also, which of them are just tasks you don’t really want to do because it’s burning into your own work life balance and it’s making you feel like burning out because you don’t feel like that’s that’s a good use of your time to sort of.
Group those tasks together and then also look at what type of tasks are really creative that you really shine in the ones that you, we really need humans for and to just observe the two groups and then from that first group, figure out what type of tools or research what type of tools are already out there that you’re able to outsource that type of work to?
And I think it’s really important that everyone starts this exercise, no matter what your level is within a company, whether you are in the front line, whether you’re a managerial, whether you’re a VP or SVP, you start to look at jobs in this type of lens. I think when everyone starts to do that I think that’s when the, when it’s a, when it’s a more organic way of integrating AI into our, our roles, because there’s always that.
I think I’ve, I’ve also heard a lot of, you know, keynotes videos out there. There’s always that saying It’s not AI that’s replacing you. It’s somebody who knows AI to replace. Yeah, I’ve heard, I just feel like I’ve heard that so many times, but I think there’s, there should be like a new, we need a new way of adjusting to this change that’s happening.
And I think it’s, Think about your role and what can be outsourced and start to, like, start for yourself to actively think about the outsourcing or the replacing. Start to replace yourself a bit. Yeah, is what I would encourage a lot of people to do.
(00:14:37) Mike Allton: That’s a smiling as you said that start to replace yourself.(00:14:41) Sharon Gai: Yeah, yeah,(00:14:42) Mike Allton: that’s an interesting piece of advice. It was Paul Roetzer who said, yes, not AI. AI were big fans of Paul Roetzer on the show. And it was funny because before we even start recording, you and I were talking about this show and you know, about how I, Use AI to generate the questions. I have an entire custom GPT that I developed that helps me research the guests, pull the information together, you know, brainstorm topics, brainstorm questions, all that sort of thing, because that was a job that was taking me two hours to do for every single guest.
And as you know, I have six podcasts between here and Agorapulse, and that would not have been feasible with that much time invested in each individual show. Now it’s two hours. 20, 30 minutes tops per show. So that’s terrific advice. And that, and that’s applicable to whether you’re an e commerce marketer or in a different industry.
Could you share some examples of some, some e commerce brands you’ve seen where they’ve used AI to turn these kinds of challenges and opportunities?
(00:15:37) Sharon Gai: Some of the brands that’s using them. There is a really well known one within our sort of circle is this company called lindex. They are a Norwegian company.
This is not coincidental that I went to Norway and discover them and it was actually in reverse fashion. But they are sort of like an H and M. So they also a they’re a mass retailer. And so they’re, they deal with hundreds of thousands of skews on a daily basis. And they were very early in creating different images that they can use for, um, for whenever they’re updating their website.
So whether it’s a model wearing their a piece of clothing and changing the model with using generative AI and how that model looks because something else that we often talk about in e commerce is personalization. So the more you personalize your customer experience or the more that you personalize in the look and feel feel of whatever you’re displaying to your customer, the better or easier you’re able to create that connection with them. So they’re very successful in doing that. What you’ve, what I’ve also seen happened a lot in in China is This advent of live streaming or live stream shopping. If you are a user of TikTok, if you’re swiping through certain videos, you’ll also see TikTok shop come up and there’s a lot of live streaming that’s being done in the U. S. by now as well. And certain brands now are using these Avatar live streamer. So sometimes as a host, as a live streamer, you would get tired or at a maximum rate, you would be live streaming for two or three hours. But this originally started in China where a lot of e commerce brands were using these AI avatar streamers and that still kept up engagement.
It still had their customers come through with whatever avatar just sort of answering on behalf of the customer. The brand in this sort of live show type of platform TikTok is doing a lot in this space in terms of bringing out helping influencers create avatars of their own. And that’s now been a really big A really big growth point for the influencer side as well.
Because when they, as an influencer, you are pretty limited with a number of brands that you could work with at a time. If you, if your to do list is already hundreds of videos or reviews or videos that you have to shoot. The idea here is if you’re an established influencer, I mean, you’re part of the TikTok symphony Ecosystem that you can train a avatar that lives within TikTok that other brands can use.
And then obviously you’re paid a fee that the TikTok is paid a fee. And that’s sort of a new model that you’ll see coming out for at least TikTok brands.
(00:18:28) Mike Allton: Wow. Okay. I have not seen that. That sounds fascinating. Now I’m going to be able to look out for brands using influencer avatars that they’ve, that they’ve leased basically right from, from the influencer.
I’m wondering though, if I’m a brand and this is new to me, how do you see an organizational mindset playing a role, particularly when it comes to, you know, adopting these kinds of, of AI technologies and working with influencers and their AI avatars, how important is mindset? You know from the organization perspective
(00:19:00) Sharon Gai: Yeah, so in a lot of my keynotes, I share this thing called the culture fluid mindset, which is Merging the old and the new together so staying true to your the the the projects the ongoing projects that you’re working on The priorities that’s happening in your organization, but keeping your eyes open and what is happening out there.
I don’t think it is a smart idea to as an, as any organization, large or small to, you know, sort of be the, the, the, the, the, the squirrel that sort of darts to and fro with every new innovation that comes out. You want to take part in it. But more so taking it with a more objective lens or more, a more tempered mindset in evaluating, is this actually going to be useful for my team or my, my organization?
And so this I usually teach this thing called the G the e commerce equation, where there’s GMB traffic AOV and conversion and looking at before implementation of any type of tool, whether it’s actually creating, whether it’s causing any of these metrics to go up and if they’re not that this, this should not be a tool that you’re going to wrap within your internal processes.
(00:20:17) Mike Allton: Fascinating advice, folks. We’re talking with Sharon Gai about the challenges and opportunities that AI is affording businesses with regard to e commerce marketing. And I’ve got several more questions for, but before I get to those, let me share with you the tool I’m using every day to help me with every aspect of my business and content production.
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with your audience. Don’t just market market smarter with Magai. Tap the link in the show notes. So when you were talking about some of the e commerce examples before you were talking about, you know, changing assets on the fly, being able to use a prompt for instance, to change the background and hundreds of, of, you know, Assets at a time.
What about data? How important is data? Do you think e commerce? And how is AI helping e commerce marketers utilize that data?
(00:22:04) Sharon Gai: Yeah, I mean, data is at the core of what e commerce is. The reason why a lot of retailers went online is to have that visibility of who’s actually coming. And where is my traffic coming from?
Is it? Is it Canada? Is it a certain state in the U. S. Versus when you’re in an offline location, you lose a lot of that data. A lot of those data points, whoever’s coming into your physical store. So there’s this concept called new retail within China. That was a term that Jack Ma had created when he really he, when he said that in the future, there really is no division between that online side and the offline side because to the customer, it’s it’s a touch point by that brand.
And so within that, the omni channel space, at least it’s, there’s huge movement in trying to bridge the two the two sides. So not only are you looking at who’s coming into your store physically, but to unite that data point to somebody who is then visiting your website, maybe once they’re at home Or if this, if this traffic initially came into your online store, how do we send this person to a physical store to actually touch and feel our product?
So there’s several different pillars within, within that and how things are connected, but there’s, there’s I think a lot of brands today and what they’re thinking about in terms of uniting the two is really important in, in putting it in a more holistic method.
(00:23:40) Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s definitely the direction that we’re going.
A friend of mine, Katie Richmond, who’s been on this show she has an AI startup that’s working in haptics and geolocation, which means when you’re walking past a store that perhaps you frequented or is the kind of thing you might want, you know, you might feel it in your watch or get a buzz on your phone.
A friend is nearby or a sale, those kinds of things. They’re, they’re all very much on the cusp of what we’re about to see. You talked about. AI agents a moment ago. And that’s, that’s what I would coin probably an emerging technology. We don’t really have AI agents yet, at least not mainstream. Talk to us about what those are, how they’re being applied to e commerce.
And if there’s any other emerging AI technologies you’re seeing that e commerce marketers in particular should be paying attention to.
(00:24:25) Sharon Gai: Yeah so there are several companies now that allow you to create those agents. I think a very prominent one is crew crew AI. I think they’re probably the biggest one so far.
That’s used on an enterprise level where, as a team, you can create this type of agent or role. You can design Whatever you want this agent to be doing and then integrating it to your internal processes. There’s companies like artisan that’s giving out sort of more packaged, less you’re creating or you’re designing the role it’s they have designed it.
And then you’re just integrating it into your larger team. They’ve designed sales agents, marketing agents, and CS agents. I have not seen any specific agents that we can be using in the e commerce space. As of now, but if there are let me know. But that could, I think that’s a, that’s probably an interesting next step for a lot of these software vendors or software or solution providers that specifically targeting these e commerce brands, because if you look at an e commerce managers day to day role, some of those tasks are also very, very repetitive.
You know, including checking out the reviews, ensuring that things are being shipped and delivered uploading certain products, writing new product detail pages shoot and doing photo shoots of those new products and uploading it onto the site. Like, a lot of those are also very repetitive as well.
And so I think if at any time in any. Buddy’s role where things are becoming repetitive. That is all ripe for some sort of agent to take over.
(00:26:07) Mike Allton: I a hundred percent agree. And to your earlier point, we were talking about data. You know, I just earlier this week, we were recording this in late August. One of my other shows, the MarTech show, we were interviewing a tool called Allison.
ai, which is focused on analyzing social advertising. Assets, the images, the videos, the copy headlines and everything that are used in advertising and helping brands make way more informed decisions. Because today, if I’m looking at my ads account, I can do an AB split test, or I can try to figure out why one ad performed better or worse than another one, but I don’t have the capacity to analyze a thousand videos and a thousand headlines.
Obviously AI can do that. And I think where you’re talking about heading with, with e commerce is being able to have programs like that, that are running and giving us analysis and then using AI agents to help inform and actually execute the recommended changes because that tool is going to come back and say, Hey, you know what you need to use and this is the funny example he shared with us.
They were working with a pet food supplier. It’s like a legacy company, been around multiple generations, and they’d always used real life cats in all their advertising and their, their model said, you know what, an animated cat would actually perform better. And the company’s like, no, no, no. We always use real cats.
We can’t use an animated cat. And so the folks at Allison said, well, can we test it? And so they tested it and sure enough, they saw an exponential increase in performance. With an animated cat asset. And then, yeah, I think to your conversation, if we could just have some AI agents that would help them then populate all their assets with that kind of thing, because as you said, you know, an e commerce brand manager, they’ve got just hundreds and hundreds of products and SKUs and digital assets that.
Would need to be changed at that point of point. So we’re talking about all the different ways that I can be used to create content and analyze performance. How do we keep humanity involved in this process? How? How do we not say, you know, what can I outsource and how can I outsource myself? Where do I stop?
Right? Where do we keep that human being involved, particularly when it comes to e commerce marketing?
(00:28:17) Sharon Gai: I think in the future it’s I think that the role that the human will play is kind of like the call that a manager plays. So if you imagine in an e commerce team, there’s usually some sort of e commerce director under this person.
There is the person that does the website. Someone does key accounts. Someone does design. Someone does merchandising. Someone does supply chain. There’s like all of these smaller roles. And I really believe that in the future, if a lot of these people start to outsource their parts of their job, that they become their, almost like a manager.
And then you have these different agents responsible for your own tasks. I think it also will eliminate a lot of middle management to because a lot of what will what will happen is once these people become managers, everyone sort of gets an gets a, gets a bump in, in, in, in the, in the entire corporate hierarchy where you don’t really need to, you know, Relay information where you don’t really need to do synchronization of information across different teams, because these I see roles will start to take that on as the actual work is being taken on by.
The agents but the human in the loop involvement is obviously still necessary because the problem with a lot of these agents is they don’t know what the real world is like, they’ve not gone through DEI trainings. They don’t know a lot of, you know, the, the. Like the, the earlier trends on Tik Tok, I was talking about.
A lot of the lingo that’s being used or why something is funny. Like a lot of those things, AI can’t really understand because they are there there’s. And they, they specialize in a specific task instead of being attuned to human emotions and psychology and behavioral economics and actually how to connect with a consumer.
They don’t live in the real world. And so The, the human is still there to sort of do the checks and the okays. So before something is realistically uploaded or publish or out in the open or released to actual consumers that that human is there to do those checks and to be the final stopping point to, to see if something is appropriate to be released and seen by the consumer.
Hundreds and thousands of customers.
(00:30:50) Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s exactly right. We actually just spent a lot of time in our previous episode with Sonny Hunt and talking about that exact issue about how the human needs to be there to ask, is this correct? Should we actually do this? Whereas an AI is just going to happily do whatever you ask it to do without question.
I joke often that one of the nice things about AI is it doesn’t get annoyed. When I ask it the same question over and over and over again, if I want 10 titles for a blog post and I don’t like the 10 it gives me, I’ll ask you for 10 more and then 10 more. And if that was me being asked to that, I would be annoyed and frustrated with you after the second and third time.
But the AI doesn’t care. It’s just going to happily do that. And the same thing is if you have an AI agent that can help you plan a trip to Bali and then actually book the trip to Bali for you, it’s not going to stop and ask, well, can you afford this? Is this really something you should do and put on your card?
You
(00:31:39) Sharon Gai: mean something that your spouse would actually talk back and ask you and question.(00:31:43) Mike Allton: Exactly. There’s no morality, there’s no ethics, there’s no control. So that’s, that’s definitely, I love that perspective. You’re right. That’s definitely what the humans need to be involved. Now, if I’m a retail, Company.
And I’m listening to all this. I’m saying, okay, this sounds great, but it also sounds expensive. I don’t know that I can afford to have all these AI agents working all this. What advice would you give someone like me? Who’s maybe hesitant to invest in AI due to all these complexities and costs that we’re perceiving.
(00:32:12) Sharon Gai: Yeah, so I also this is inspired from something called the Eisenhower matrix, which is a way to prioritize your tasks. And in that version, there was that urgency versus impact as the Y and X axis in this. I don’t know what I’m going to call this type of framework yet. But basically it’s a decision making mechanism where if you imagine on the X axis, we have impact on the, on the Y axis, we have effort.
You’ll have four quadrants where something is high impact, high effort. Things are low impact, low effort. Things are high impact, low effort, and then low impact. Well, there’s the four and that there are certain and then if you imagine all of the tasks that you had that I talked about earlier, I’m plopping them on these four quadrants And or if you are, if you’re an e commerce team and you’re plopping up different priorities or projects within that team in these four quadrants, you’ll quickly see which actual projects have high returns to a high impact that are that it’s actually, you know, increasing your bottom line.
And so I would advise that the the, the low, the high impact, low effort tasks be done first or that you do right now and that the other quadrants are either investing or considering doing and that there are high effort and low impact things that you’re just deleting because we all have so many different deadlines coming at us.
Tasks coming at us. People are asking us for different things, and sometimes you just have to learn to say no to them because they don’t impact us in a very substantial way. Instead of. Feeling like you need to burn out or saying yes to everyone that you employ this type of methodology so that you’re actually doing the things that are actually beneficial for your bottom line.
(00:34:08) Mike Allton: That is great advice. Whether we’re talking about implementing AI or anything else in your, in your business, or maybe even your personal life. So definitely check out the Eisenhower matrix. Maybe I’ll find a graphic and pop it in the show notes so you can visualize that. Sharon, last question. I, I’m just wondering if you could look ahead, bring out your crystal ball and try to tell us what trends you see happening in e commerce marketing, particularly AI, what should e commerce marketers be mindful of?(00:34:35) Sharon Gai: I think they, I think Still being mindful of what is taking a lot of time in their roles and what they can start to outsource. But I think what you’ll see within the ecommerce space is there’s going to be a lot more new brands. Coming into the scene, a new brands a new types of products coming on.
So the, the landscape is going to get a lot more competitive. There’s going to be also a lot more marketplaces coming in and platforms coming in. So sometimes as a brand, maybe you’ll feel like I now have to double my work or triple my work because Walmart, my marketplace is coming out. TikTok shop now is coming out.
And then there’s the Amazon that I have to manage the. com that I have to manage. And you’ll have, you’ll, you’ll probably feel like sort of being being split every which way. I think that’s the moment where you would try to employ that, that Eisenhower matrix methodology of considering everything.
What is going to bring the most impact and what should you say yes to in terms of trials what you should say no to in terms of trials and just remembering that change has always been a constant within this e commerce space. I mean, in the digital world, there’s. There’s constantly these new tools, whether it’s prompt to video, prompt to photo new tools coming out and, and which one is actually going to make a substantial difference to, to your store.
(00:36:08) Mike Allton: Sharon, this has been such a powerful talk. Thank you so much for your insights. For those who want to learn more about you, may reach out, have you speak at their event, where should they go?(00:36:18) Sharon Gai: Yeah. Feel free to find me at my website. So Sharon Gai. com or I am still the only Sharon Gai on LinkedIn. And an easy way to remember my last name is G AI.
And I, and I have that AI embedded in my last name. So it’s, it’s very easy to find me.
(00:36:36) Mike Allton: That’s awesome. We’ll have all the links to Sharon’s profiles and websites in the show notes. That’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends, but don’t forget if you’re struggling with how to implement AI in your marketing day to day, I’ve got the marketing primer for you the link in the show notes, you can check that out.
It’s a free guide that can help you ramp up your marketing and your AI knowledge today, don’t forget to find the AI marketing unpacked podcast on Apple and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think until next time, welcome to the grid. Thanks for joining us on AI in Marketing: Unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies.
If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review. We’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have. Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing.
Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.
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