Generative AI in the Digital Experience Lifecycle
Photo by Mojahid Mottakin on Unsplash
It’s bigger than Ben Hur!
It’s the new black!
Generative AI is a thing. A big, big, big thing - and it's sitting behind the most explosive technology growth in history.
The technology has gone from a newborn to literally taking the world by storm in what seems like a matter of weeks. Here are a couple of stats that blow the hair back, and remind me of the good old days of the emergent internet:
- Generative AI went mainstream in 2023. OpenAI’s ChatGPT made history in January by becoming the fastest-growing consumer application, ramping up to 100 million daily active users in just 40 days. Source Reuters.
- The market for generative AI is anticipated to increase from USD 11.3 billion in 2023 to USD 51.8 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 35.6% over the course of the forecast period. Source MarketsandMarkets.
- AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined. Source PwC.
So, yeah, big. 100 million users in 40 days!
Bill Gates – "AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone."
What does this all mean in the broader world of Digital Experience, and specifically how can Sitecore owners jump onboard?
The biggest mistake is to simply think of Generative AI as some kind of automated copywriter on steroids. It’s much, much more than that.
The following table outlines that gen AI has a place across the DX/marketer lifecycle. I tend to think of where it fits across 3 buckets:
- Assistive
- Discoverability
- Experiential
Assistive is pretty much what everyone thinks about when they think about content. All that is true – inside Sitecore, or Content Hub you can generate text, images, video and all that stuff. The video will look a bit (ok, a lot) weird though – best to wait a month or two for that to look photo-real. 😉
What people don’t realise is that ChatGPT can help with taxonomy and metadata among a myriad of other Sitecore admin and page creation tasks.
Here are some examples:
- Generating meta descriptions: ChatGPT can help generate concise and compelling meta descriptions for your web pages.
- Optimizing meta titles: ChatGPT can suggest effective meta titles that accurately represent the content of your web pages while incorporating relevant keywords.
- Providing keyword research: ChatGPT can assist with keyword research to identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords for your website's metadata.
- Assisting with schema markup: ChatGPT can help you understand and implement schema markup, a structured data vocabulary that provides search engines with additional context about your website's content.
Discoverability means, essentially, that search will never be the same again. It’s had the same user paradigm forever – i.e., user types in search terms and out pops a list. He who has the best list, wins. All that changes when the tool is able to learn about you and remember your preferences and the preferences of people just like you and is able to carry on search refinement in a real-time conversation. That is huge, and it is why Microsoft, Google and other planet-makers are madly competing to win this race.
Your site search will never be the same again. Given search is right up there in web site complaint-land, that’s a good thing.
Experiential is where the DX rubber hits the road.
Some common use cases include:
- Real-time recommendations: ChatGPT can analyse user interactions, preferences, and behaviour to generate personalised recommendations in real time.
- Dynamic content generation: ChatGPT can generate dynamic content on the fly, such as personalised product descriptions, blog articles, or landing page content.
- Interactive conversational interfaces: Implementing a chatbot powered by ChatGPT on your website allows users to engage in interactive conversations. The chatbot can understand user queries, provide personalised responses, and offer recommendations based on individual preferences.
- User profiling and segmentation: By analysing user interactions with your website, ChatGPT can help in creating user profiles and segments. These profiles can include preferences, browsing history, demographics, and more.
Recently Zapier announced that they have a ChatGPT integration with Google Analytics. This introduces the following:
- Data interpretation and insights: ChatGPT can help interpret the data collected by Google Analytics. You can ask specific questions about your website's performance, user behaviour, traffic sources, conversion rates, and more.
- Custom reporting: ChatGPT can generate custom reports based on the data in Google Analytics. You can specify the metrics, dimensions, timeframes, and segments you're interested in, and ChatGPT can generate reports tailored to your requirements.
- Data exploration and visualization: ChatGPT can help explore and visualize data from Google Analytics. You can ask questions like "Show me the trend of website traffic over the past month" or "Compare the conversion rates of different marketing campaigns." ChatGPT can generate charts, graphs, or tables to help you understand and communicate the data effectively.
- Predictive analysis: By combining historical data from Google Analytics with other relevant information, ChatGPT can help with predictive analysis. You can ask questions like "What will be the expected website traffic next month?" or "Which user segment is more likely to convert?" ChatGPT can provide predictions or insights based on the available data, helping you make informed decisions.
So, far from just being a curio that generates text and pics Generative AI will revolutionise DX.
I’ll finish with a statement from Sitecore.
"Sitecore is committed to enabling integration to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which will enable marketers the ability to integrate Generative AI functionality into their Sitecore-powered martech stack to supercharge efficiency, personalization, and content production at scale across Sitecore’s entire range of composable solutions."
Look over your shoulder, that’s a mighty big wave brewing…it’s time to start paddling.
Aceik recently hosted a webinar on how Sitecore can help you to revolutionise your digital experience by integrating ChatGPT and generative AI.