Future Retail View: Scaling tech to meet growing content demands

Retail Technology interviews John Williams, Amplience co-CEO and chief technology officer, on the growing need for dynamic and personalised commerce content 

A recent survey found that almost two-thirds (64%) of digitally engaged consumers would click away from a brand's website if it didn’t offer a personalised experience.

Indeed, Amplience co-CEO and chief technology officer John Williams believes retailers must exponentially scale their content generation capabilities to deliver true personalisation. 

Williams should know, having led Amplience to become one of the market-leading content management system (CMS) providers after co-founding the company in 2010.

He explained: “If you want to personalise today, you have to know who your customers are and want to have relevant conversations with them.” 

Personalisation challenges 

“If you’ve got nothing to say, or you’re saying the same thing, then actually it’s worse,” he said. “This is because you don’t have enough content, you can’t create enough quickly enough, and it’s too expensive to create using the current production processes.”

Speaking exclusively to RetailTechnology.co.uk at Amplify24, the Amplience customer conference held in London earlier last month, Williams said content had an increasingly vital role in engaging online and offline customers. 

“Today, retailers and brands don’t know where the customer journey’s starting,” he explained, adding that the traditional marketing funnel from consideration to conversion has evolved. The customer journey is no longer linear. 

“A customer might go straight from a TikTok shop, straight into a PDP [product display page] and, then you’ve got something like two seconds from that first impression to convince them to stay and that it’s relevant for what they want.”

Exceeding customer expectations

The influence of multimedia-based social commerce, particularly search, has only increased consumer expectations of more engaging, immersive and personalised content.  

Williams continued: “If you click through and you’ve just got this boring, flat PDP with an image and a price, it’s not going to resonate, right? Then, it just becomes a choice that comes down to price differentiation.

“But, when they come through from social channels and click through to the experience you offer, you’ve got an opportunity to inspire them.”

However, retailers and brands are struggling to create enough rich, relevant and immersive content to match the ever-expanding permutations of customers’ shopping journeys.

Content generation opportunities

Williams explained that Amplience is working to address the process and technology-based issues associated with producing content at speed, scale and a reasonable cost.

Delivering this is where generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) comes in. “The new GenAI technology coming out will solve some of the real problems we think our customers have, which I’ve already articulated, which is why they need more content.

“Generative technology allows you to create far more content,” he continued. “So, you have the opportunity to start creating more variants that resonate in different contexts.”

Context is critical, according to Williams. “Notice that I’ve tried to use the word’ context.” rather than personalised, purposely,” he said. 

Future of content management 

In his Amplify24 keynote (pictured), Williams unveiled the Amplience Content Studio to answer industry demand for producing more contextually relevant content at scale.

Content Studio uses GenAI to create engaging product content in a retailer or brand’s voice from a suite of templates.

“Imagine a world where you use Content Studio to do your prototyping,” he said. “You set up all the parameters within the tool until you perfect the output that you want. 

“Those settings then become the blueprint within a content factory. You can then wire your data sources into that blueprint. For instance, maybe you just pointed at a folder with 1,000 product images. You push it into the blueprint and get 10,000 product descriptions out.”

Context is king

Williams highlighted integrating AI models, including GPT-4, into the Amplience platform to generate product descriptions and localised content. 

However, he underlined the added importance of context and quality in AI-generated content to avoid down-ranking by search engines, where AI content-generated checks may impact search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. 

“I think the real [SEO] threat is going to go beyond AI checkers, and we’ve not seen this yet,” he said. “But that’s what it’s really going to mean when we move away from indexed search to AI search.

“We don’t know where that’s going to take us right now,” he concluded. “But, at the minute, if you think about it, all search is is a big, long index, and you’re just choosing the right things out of that index, whereas AI search is not of an index, it’s in some sort of memory that you’re contextually pulling things out of.”

[RetailTechnology.co.uk published this interview as a sponsored article.]