Lights, Camera, Conversion? AI meets Online Retail!

In partnership with

For those that are new around here, this is weekly newsletter where I highlight new and innovative AI products that are worth exploring.

Hey hey!

Happy Friday! We’re back for another issue.

In this week’s issue:

• Product (Experiment) of the Week

• Other AI Things Happened

• What I’m Watching

My Favorite Newsletter: Stay ahead on the business of AI 

Have you heard of Prompts Daily newsletter? I recently came across it and absolutely love it.

AI news, insights, tools and workflows. If you want to keep up with the business of AI, you need to be subscribed to the newsletter (it’s free).

Read by executives from industry-leading companies like Google, Hubspot, Meta, and more.

Want to receive daily intel on the latest in business/AI?

In just ONE click, you can quickly sign up to the free Prompts Daily newsletter.

PRODUCT OF THE WEEK!

After testing dozens of AI products this week. Here’s my report!

This week’s product of the week I found on ProductHunt! Don’t be fooled, I think it’s got quite a bit of potential. We’re talking Packify.ai in this issue. This sweet SaaS is in the business of helping your online business! It piqued my curiosity and demonstrated significant potential to bring a breath of fresh air to independent/SMB e-commerce retailers.

The intersection of AI and eCommerce has been a thing for a while on the large corporate side, and considering the release of LLMs we’ve been seeing more adoption at the smaller business level. The beachhead for AI-tech making it down to the SMBs was opened with text-based applications, and have been around for a little bit. eCommerce Retailers currently have access to tools in the range of:

• AI-generative Product Descriptions

• AI-Website templates & web content

• Customer Review Analysis engines powered by LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, LLama and friends)

• AI-Generated Advertisement Copy

Visuals are the current frontier for much of the commercial efforts, since video isn’t entirely there yet. With this context mind, its fair to say that Product staging getting a boost is quite a welcome assistant for smaller producers and SMBs that have been for one reason or another pulled into the online selling scene.

What’s Packify all about?

Packify.ai boosts product showcase potential! This conversational (yes, I know we’ve read that part before) tool lets anyone craft custom packaging concepts, and stage their products for ecommerce sales through a chat + point and click web interface. This sweet deal has an AI-driven engine in the backend that takes your product photoshoot tooling up a well noted notch.

Packify.ai’s AI-driven engine powers the service’s backend that generates and /or transforms product photos in ways that were once only accessible through any combination of expertise, expensive software, and/or professional services.

Pictures are worth thousands of words: Look At My Experiment Results!

I decided to test this by creating a fictitious Gaming keyboard company called “SkyWing”. The aesthetic goals would be to have a presentable consumer product that could balance a minimalist packaging experience and still present the “technical” appeal of feature-rich keyboards. The result, as you can see is pretty sweet. The concepts put forward by the solution demonstrated in depth retention of many design concepts in how products are presented, appealing directly to the visual-centric nature of online consumers.

The user-friendly nature of the tool ensures that anyone can design and stage their products without prior experience, so long as they find the words to properly describe their vision. The platform guides users through a seamless process, asking questions, getting to know what your expectations, all within a few intuitive steps. This ease of use is not just about accessibility; it's about empowering SMBs to take control of their brand narrative and how their products are perceived in the competitive e-commerce arena.

Closing Notes

For those SMB owners eager to explore the possibilities of AI in e-commerce without committing to hefty investments or steep learning curves, Packify.ai offers a promising solution. It’s time to explore how this tool can transform your online sales strategy and enhance your product appeal. For businesses that have pivoted online, especially under the duress of market pressures or global upheavals, this tool offers a lifeline to enhance their digital storefronts.

Balancing this with the market upticks in consumer preferences for gritty imperfections in marketing efforts overall, I’m curious to see how this fares in the headwinds.

OTHER AI THINGS HAPPENED

Some other notable news and product launches from this week

• FiscalNote's StressLens: FiscalNote just launched StressLens, a super cool AI agent designed to help businesses figure out the "human element" in risk scenarios, giving them a fresh set of tools to better understand complex risks. 🕵️‍♂️🤖 Source: BusinessWire

• Zendesk and AI in Customer Service: Over at Zendesk, they're all about using AI to make customer service slicker and more efficient, ensuring agents can keep customers smiling without breaking a sweat. 😃👩‍💻 Source: Verdict

• TrustArc and DoubleVerify's AI Certification: TrustArc just handed DoubleVerify the very first "Responsible AI Certification," spotlighting their commitment to ethical AI usage. 🌟🤖 Source: PR Newswire

• SpatialEdge's Funding Success: South African AI startup SpatialEdge has just bagged $3.1 million to scale up their retail game, aiming to enhance shopping experiences with their tech. 🛍️💡 Source: Disrupt Africa

• Salsify and AI in E-Commerce: Salsify is leveraging AI to bridge the gap between online buyers and the product content they see, making shopping online smoother and smarter. 🛒🔗 Source: Digital Commerce 360

Raises Recap

• Rubedo Life Sciences' Series A Funding: Rubedo Life Sciences is buzzing with excitement after securing a whopping $40M in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and Ahren Innovation Capital, setting the stage for advanced research in aging and disease. 🚀🔬 Source: BusinessWire

• NVIDIA's Acquisition of Run:ai: NVIDIA is gearing up to potentially shell out up to a cool billion dollars to snag Run:ai, an Israeli startup rocking the AI infrastructure space with its advanced orchestration and virtualization software tailored for AI workloads on GPUs. 🚀🧠 Sources: StreetInsider, Calcalistech

• Parloa's Series B Funding: Berlin-based Parloa is injecting a hefty €61.7 million Series B into its operations to scale and enhance its AI-powered customer service platform, promising smarter automated interactions across industries. 🤖💬 Source: EU Startups

WHAT I'M WATCHING

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

- Anais Nin

Interesting notes on futurism, human perspectives on what exactly it is AI is turning out to be. This inspires a conversation around a development consensus for the growth of these technologies.

Stay well, and until next week.

-✌🏽 Sam

P.S. Interested in having me give you private feedback about a product that you are building? Send me an email: [email protected]