“What’s my generative AI strategy?” Microsoft is helping consumer goods brand marketers embrace the era of AI
Business leaders are asking us; What can generative AI do for my business? How do I stay in front of the AI-driven tidal wave of evolving business processes? Each line of business worldwide has a team of strategic people who are tasked with “figuring it out.” Marketers are looking at how generative AI can help to maximize ROI by transforming rapidly surmounting and valuable first-party data from reactive, to real-time, to predictive. Generative AI is the great enabler of a predictive marketing strategy.
Marketers are asking us how can generative AI:
- Accelerate time to market
- Drive marketer efficiency
- Accomplish creativity at scale
- Make analytics more accessible
Generative AI streamlines communication between humans, computers, and data, simplifying the work we do by enabling conversational queries across analytics, email generation, marketing content, and even retail media. It is now a critical time to put data at the core of your marketing strategy.
Generative AI in consumer goods and retail
When thinking about how to retain and increase the lifetime value of loyal customers, generative AI can use deep understanding and intent, and get more accurate with each query and interaction. It can elevate the shopper experience and maximize the value of your data in unparalleled ways. Below are a few use cases we’ve been hearing from our consumer goods and retailer customers that can help you brainstorm and prioritize your investments in an AI strategy.
Reply to customers faster, with localized messaging, and on-brand. Brands used to give call center employees massive binders filled with scripts detailing every possible customer problem and solution. With generative AI there are infinite paths of conversation in the decision tree. Chatbots can even showcase your brand’s conversational style.
Revolutionize your site’s search engine. Sometimes the only conversation you will ever have with a customer is via your site’s search bar. Imagine: need dinner? Type “how do I make chicken casserole” into the search bar and have all the best-selling, in-stock ingredients populate in basket. Broken fence? Type “there’s a hole in my fence” and marvel as all the necessary tools populate in your digital basket. Investing in this critical engagement may lead to significantly higher conversation rates and basket size. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, power rich semantic search experiences over a variety of content across web, mobile, and enterprise applications—using customer intent versus keywords. You can also generate search summaries and analytics internally to better predict product demand and recommendations. Investing in your search engine may significantly improve customer experience.
Satya Nadella provided several examples during the Microsoft Build 2023 keynote. View the entire keynote below, or see the plug-in extensibility with shopping cart example at time stamp 11:11.
Make faster, more informed decisions on where to invest in e-commerce improvements with accessible analytics. Clarity chat, a free analytics tool that delivers advanced e-commerce and site analytics, allows brands to ask questions about their data in natural language. How’s my website performing week over week? What’s my bounce rate? Get simple, accessible summaries and analytics from your data.
Reach customers in new, native ways online. It’s a new era of search. As CVP of Microsoft Advertising, Kya Sainsbury-Carter said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, “the future of search is an integrated experience across search, answers, chat and creating.” New ad formats are on the rise with AI-powered Microsoft Bing. The new Bing is empowering brands, publishers, and app creators to choose the ad formats they know drives the best results and customer experiences, serving native ads on chat platforms from Microsoft and other companies.
Democratize data for non-technical employees to make real-time and predictive optimizations. In today’s economy, brands can’t afford to wait days or weeks for an analysis to be prepared and delivered before making much-needed campaign optimizations. Generative AI enables marketers to ask campaign data questions using natural language, so insights are even more accessible. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights allows non-technical employees to ask data questions using everyday language identifying the best performing segments and channels to drive sales.
Experiment with automating content generation at scale, speeding up the writing and image generation processes. For many, a blank page is the most intimidating part of the creative process, and with countless numbers of legacy and emerging channels requiring campaign content derivatives with unique specifications—text, video, visuals, tweets, posts, blogs, email, website—marketers need a (shall I say it?) copilot. Generative AI amplifies human capacity for creativity and speed-to-launch. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing can accelerate campaign time-to-launch for marketers by offering inspiration and simply creating personalized content, and Dalle-2 in Azure OpenAI can generate a variety of campaign images across marketing mediums using natural language text.
Drive better engagement with product detail page content creation. Many brands struggle managing wildly different descriptions, images, and reviews across websites selling their products, to test product description page content and find the winning version. Generative AI aggregates digital descriptions and reviews of a product across the internet and standardizes the product detail pages with the best variation. In an example with Carmax, Azure OpenAI was used to produce 11 years’ worth of car summaries in a matter of months. The impact led to hyper-personalized offers to customers, time and cost optimization through intelligent search engine optimization, and increased revenue.
You can even accelerate configuration of shipping labels. Generative AI can generate new labels without constraints to find the best possible use of space.
Create a ChatGPT like experience tailored to your own enterprise data. In this demo, you can see the Azure OpenAI Service based assistant for enterprise data in action.
How do I get started?
- You can reach out to the Microsoft Sales team or Azure Sales team which can provide you with the latest information, available AI services, and other relevant Azure OpenAI offerings. Microsoft Azure Sales: Visit the Azure website and navigate to the “Chat with Sales” bot on the lower right side. There, you’ll be connected to the right resources to get started on our AI journey.
- It is imperative to define objectives first. What areas of the strategy can benefit from generative AI that will maximize ROI in the shortest amount of time? To help refine your use cases, connect with a Microsoft Internal Sales Team through the chat-bot on the Azure site, or one of Microsoft partners leveraging Azure OpenAI. Based on the results you’re hoping to achieve, they can guide you through defining the data input needed to ensure the outcomes in your AI investment yield desired results. Accuracy is key. AI is only as useful as the data foundation beneath it.
- Start with small and measurable projects. This is still new technology. Then then iterate, improve, and take on bigger projects.
- Deploy responsible AI measures into the strategy from the start. Consumer packaged goods (CPG’s) can work with Microsoft experts to ensure ethical considerations, privacy regulations, and consumer data protection policies are met.
Learn more with Microsoft resources
- New era of value realization is here—put your data to work with AI
- Responsible AI principles from Microsoft
- What is Microsoft’s approach to AI?
- Visit our Consumer Goods and Retail blog homepages to stay informed.
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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog