Future of shopping will be powered by AI, says former Amazon executive
Max Sinclair says e-commerce is being transformed by tech that understands consumers’ preferences and makes personalised recommendations
E-commerce is on the cusp of a revolutionary transformation, says Max Sinclair, a former Amazon executive and AI specialist.
Sinclair, 29, is the co-founder of Ecomtent, which leverages AI technology to help e-commerce sellers and retailers optimise their visual and written product listing content for AI-powered search.
He says: “Generative AI will completely transform how consumers shop online, with conversational-style search poised to become the new normal. The current best search engine optimisation [making products easier to find online] practices will look completely outdated in just 12 months. Longtail keyword matching is dead, and the future will be matching customer intent across both written and visual assets.”
Ecomtent’s technology generates product descriptions, blog posts, and other types of content quickly and efficiently and improves how products are presented, making them more appealing to potential buyers.
Founded in 2022, Ecomtent recently raised $850,000 in pre-seed funding, led by MaRS Investment. Last year, Ecomtent participated in Techstars Future of Ecommerce powered by eBay and the funding round included Techstars and eBay Ventures. The company has already made significant strides in the market, completing successful pilots with major retailers, including two with annual revenues of $11 billion and $14 billion, positioning Ecomtent as the go-to solution within the Amazon seller and agency communities.
Sinclair believes it won’t be long before we have AI ‘agents’ handling our shopping for us.
He predicts that these intelligent LLMs (large language models) aka machine learning models that can comprehend and generate human language text, will be able to understand consumer preferences, make personalised recommendations and even complete purchases autonomously, effectively serving as personal shoppers.
“In couple of years, we will have AI agents doing the shopping for us. If think about boring purchases, like washing machine parts where you have to search for and scroll through endless options… This transformation of AI agents will streamline the shopping process, eliminating the need for customers to manually sift through countless product listings.”
He continues: “We will have an AI agent, and we will say: ‘Hi Alexa, or whoever, buy me a xxx. We will move towards trusting AI, just as we do people, and trust it to search the web and find the best prices as it learns to understand our needs.”
Earlier this year, Amazon launched Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalogue and information from across the web. Rufus can answer customer questions on shopping needs, products and comparisons, make recommendations based on this, and facilitate product discovery in the same Amazon shopping experience that customers use regularly. Users can ask Rufus a variety of questions, from general product research like “What should I consider when buying a TV?” to more specific inquiries including product comparisons and recommendations. Rufus is now available to all UK customers in the Amazon Shopping app.
A former Amazon executive, Sinclair spent six years at the online global giant. He held various leadership positions that shaped his understanding of the e-commerce landscape. He led the launch of Amazon Business (B2B) in the UK, oversaw customer browse and catalogue quality for Amazon’s launch in Singapore, and played a key role in scaling up Amazon’s Grocery business across the EU.
“I learnt about the intricacies of online retail and the challenges faced by sellers and retailers and saw the potential of AI in e-commerce after witnessing the capabilities of Stable Diffusion, an AI model that can generate high-quality images from text descriptions.”
In 2022, he teamed up with Timur Luguev, who has a PhD in AI. Recognising the transformative power of this technology, they developed a minimum viable product (MVP) over a single weekend, and the rest was history.
As for the future, Sinclair says that what we know now will look unrecognisable, “the same way that we look at prehistoric humans as unrecognisable.”
He adds: “We are looking at a LLM search-based future and our role is to help seller and retailers prepare for it.”
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