Why You Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love AI

Love it or loathe it, you can’t avoid AI. And as its technological horizons continue to expand, so do the hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties of everyone affected. 

Which is, well, everyone! 

That includes marketers and market leaders alike, who are (understandably) wondering: 

How will AI impact our bottom line?

We’re here to tell you to stop worrying. Beyond the hype, the doom, and the billion-dollar valuations lies a technology that, when you approach it from the right angle, can transform the way you interact with your customers. 

The location of this colossal transformation? The humble search bar. Let’s take a closer look.

AI Search vs. Traditional Search

When bots and crawlers capable of searching web pages wormed their way into our lives in the mid-90s, they were as groundbreaking as pairing a bucket hat with bike shorts. The ability to retrieve specific pages based on keywords and view them on your personal machine was a revolutionary innovation that allowed the development of the internet as we know it. 

Applied to ecommerce, search has allowed retailers to highlight a huge range of products to customers, and, even better, it’s based on what the customer wants, and has a staggering effect on revenue per session, conversions, and LTV. 

But today, the limits of traditional search engines are being tested. 

Traditional search relies on linking keywords to “documents.” When a customer enters a keyword, all the documents that have been tagged with this keyword are retrieved by the search function and displayed as results. 

This works great if you know exactly what you’re looking for and can enter a crystal-clear, unambiguous keyword. 

But the traditional method of searching for products won’t help customers who:

• Kind of know what they’re looking for but not exactly
• Can’t remember the name of the product they’re shopping for
• Want some inspiration
• Are searching terms with two or more possible meanings
• Want to search ‘around’ a category

In these cases, you need an expanded set of tools to capture searcher intent. And this is where AI comes into play. 

What Exactly Makes a Search Solution “AI-Powered”?

These days it seems everything from cars to can openers are ‘AI-powered’, but, beyond the hype, what does the term mean? And, when applied to commerce search, what benefits does it bring? 

AI makes your data work harder

Data is the key to effective personalization. And AI can take your data and use it to provide more relevant search results. 

For example, rather than generating the same results every time, AI-powered site search can return personalized results, customer-by-customer. So, depending on previous behavior, preferences, and historical interactions, AI search will offer a different set of results for different customers—even if they search for exactly the same thing! 

Putting your data to work in this way means your search is constantly learning, feeding off user input, and making the next query even more accurate and relevant than the last. 

AI makes your search more human

Natural language processing (NLP) can interpret a wider range of search queries than traditional search, while semantic search makes associations between conceptually related products or categories. In both cases, AI sits in between your search interface and database, interpreting the natural language queries that customers increasingly use. 

It’s a neat trick that exposes more of your catalog, boosts accuracy and relevance, and makes your search experience more engaging.

How AI is Saving Search

Online retail is an overcrowded marketplace. When customers go online,  whether through social media, Google searches, or other means, they’re bombarded by a cacophony of ads and marketing drives. 

Add to this cramped and noisy scene a long and grueling period of inflation that’s made customers more reluctant to part with their cash, and the online retail landscape in 2024 is one of increased competition, reduced customer loyalty, and a desperate need to stand out online. It’s a recipe for sharply rising customer acquisition costs that eat away at profitability.

How can you hope to swim against this strong tide? An intelligent and personalized site search, powered by AI, attracts customers with intuitive and personalized experiences. It can help establish your brand as easy, convenient, and fast, exceeding customer expectations and boosting revenue. 

Here’s how that little box of artificial tricks does it:

• AI creates more personalized experiences: The search bar is no longer off-limits for personalization. Search can learn your customers’ preferences and habits, keeping them coming back for more with the deeply personalized offerings repeated use brings. 

• AI makes results fast and intuitive: Give customers the tools they need to quickly get to where they want to go. Using AI in Search puts customers in the driver’s seat of a luxury car. You want to vaguely stab at the keyboard with a phrase that half-resembles the thing you’re looking for and still find what you need in a matter of seconds? No problem! AI-powered personalized search can help with that!

• AI creates better mobile experiences: AI helps with your all-important mobile optimization, too. Subtle touches that your customers might not even consciously note, like auto-complete suggestions and voice search, are made more smooth, efficient, and effective with AI. 

Beyond Search: AI’s Impact on Product Discovery

Winning in today’s ecommerce environment means connecting the right customer to the right product at the right time. This simple but elusive goal has just been made a whole lot easier to achieve. 

Since the AI explosion, one of the clearest trends in online retail has been the merger of search & product discovery, something that’s reshaping the way customers and brands interact.

This change is great news for your CRO strategy. Areas traditionally considered to be low-intent parts of the customer journey are becoming more relevant, actionable, and intuitive:

• Dynamic and responsive product rankings: Just as you can progressively optimize your search results by observing how customers interact with them, you can change your PLP or recommendation product rankings according to customer preference. 

• Personalized product recommendations: AI gives you expanded context when understanding your customers and their journey. It makes automated decisions about which products to recommend to which audience, and at what point during their session. 

• ML-powered dynamic bundles: Create thoughtful, personalized, and high-converting bundles of products automatically and at scale. Dynamic bundling makes suggestions like ‘complete the look’ more appealing by combining automated personalization decisions, business rules, and manual merchandising inputs.

The result of all these innovations in product discovery? A more meaningful experience for customers that leads to Increased conversion rates, customer loyalty, and engagement, and reduced abandonment rates.