How Shopify AI Can Supercharge Your Business

0:00You're going to be at a huge disadvantage if you're on a different platform than Shopify, who has the best ecosystem for e-commerce. I couldn't imagine running our business at this point and at this size without it. In Los Angeles, I'm Benjamin Gottlieb, and you're listening to this special edition of Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. You know, there is so much excitement right now surrounding generative AI. And so I bet you're wondering how you can use artificial intelligence to improve your business. Well, lucky for you, there is an entire team thinking about this at Shopify.

0:38And it's led by our guest today, McDodd Jaffer. McDodd and his team have built AI directly into Shopify. And they call this suite of new or improved features Shopify magic. McDodd is here to walk you through some of the biggest innovations and answer some of those AI questions you're afraid to ask. McDodd, thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. This is a lot of fun looking forward to this. Absolutely. Also with me today, Mikey Moran. Mikey is the CEO of Private Label. It's one of the largest hair extension wholesalers out there, and he's already seen some incredible success using AI for his business.

1:14And yeah, Mikey is on Shopify. What's going on, Mikey? I'm just happy to be here in Atlanta and talk about AI. It's an exciting, exciting time. It's definitely exciting, but McDodd, let's start with this. Artificial intelligence isn't new, but something changed this year, right? I mean, what exactly happened that's got everyone so excited? Yeah, ChatGPT comes out and takes the world by storm and everybody's talking AI. I think it took every social media platform. They had fastest path to a million users until threads came out. And it just went wild. And I think that when we saw it, we're like, how do we get this to our merchants?

1:53How do we make this possible for more people to use? And what's the quickest thing that we can do to get this in front of them? And when you say chat GBT, most folks know what that is. But for those who are a little bit unsure, this is generative AI. It creates text, can do images, can do video in times, and this is generating things from prompts. So I've got to ask you, generative AI really is only as good as the information it has, right? So what advantages does Shopify have when it comes to the data being fed to AI? I think for me, it was just seeing the quality of the output. And I think that there's a lot of technology that comes out that has a lot of hype cycles around it.

2:33What I saw with AI was utility.

2:39And I think that that was the fun part about it. It wasn't, generative AI wasn't just about like, oh, this is cool. Like I can write something for myself or I can write an email or I can write a WhatsApp message. This was, I can put this to use everywhere and the quality is great. And with a little bit of tweaking and knowing exactly what to put in there, you can get something that's way better. And it supplements and augments the creative process, which was uncanny to me. I didn't think creative process could jump in that way that quickly. And it was wild to see something that good. Well, you mentioned that it supplements the creative process.

3:17We're going to get into that throughout this episode because that remains one of the main concerns from some folks about AI. But Mikey, I want to turn to you. You were one of the early adopters of AI. You use it in your business, private label. What do you use it for right now? And where has it been the most successful for you? Oh, as soon as I saw Shopify magic, I saw the little icon. I said, what the heck is this? And I said, oh, Shopify did it. So initially what we did is we went through and started reworking a lot of product descriptions. I mean, we have hundreds of products. And I can tell you if you're a new store owner or especially if you've been in the industry for a while, if you add a whole suite of new products and you have to add product descriptions for these, the first couple is cool.

4:01You're all hyped up and excited. And then you'll notice the creative process in your brain and the words. It just all starts becoming the same. it becomes very, very difficult to stay creative for a long period of time. And that's where Shopify magic comes in. And it just, it blew my mind how fast I could create amazing product descriptions. Shopify magic though is different from chat GBT, for example. And the reason that it's so different is because of the data that we can pull from to help you with what Mikey just described, those product descriptions. What do we have that other folks just don't?

4:39Well, I think part of it is that like some of this is we know what good looks like. And I think starting from like that position makes it a lot easier to get that and scale it. The other part is that we've got the merchant that has done this over and over again and has had variety of success in many, many places. So it's not just about like, oh, we're just going to use one merchant's data to help another. It's not that at all. I think the idea is that like we're using one merchant's data to help themselves. And I think that that's the difference here is we know what good looks like. We know how to prompt it.

5:12We don't have to have you figure out how to use AI. So how much can we do with what you already have to accelerate you just that much faster? And so in essence, what we're doing is relying on not just what you've done, but other success across our ecosystem. Is that right? We are using the other success as a means to be able to like determine what good looks like, but it's not used as part of the training or the model itself or like individual shops. The idea is that each merchant's data is their data. We don't want to pollute that. This is the ability to like put together the right prompt with the right conditions against the right merchant context to get something great.

5:51I'm glad you said that word prompt. I think for many folks who've been working with generative AI, sometimes that's the unlock, right? You're sitting there and it's like, gosh, what do I tell the computer? What do I tell the machine to help me? And it's confusing. Do this. And it's kind of tangentially related. And do this. Then it's somewhere over the top. So, Mikey, how have you been training your employees to prompt AI properly in this context in Shopify Magic? Oh, for sure. So, when I first would sit down with some of the staff, I said, look, I know AI, it sounds intimidating, but the way Shopify has it set up, it's going to make your job a lot easier.

6:28And as a business owner, it saves them a lot of time, which saves me a lot of money. So right away, this is looking really good. And it's coming down to like the brand voice. So, you know, Shopify magic, you have expert, daring, playful, sophisticated, persuasive, supportive. There's all these different tones that you can use. And these are in a dropdown menu that you can select from. Right. It's in a dropdown menu, super easy to use. I say, look, go ahead. and the first couple ones, we're not gonna use any of them. We're just gonna play with it. So go ahead and just play with using the different prompts and the different selections for those.

7:06It's like, what does an expert look like versus custom versus sophisticated? And let's try to figure out what's gonna work the best for our brand voice. Now, once it's done, don't just say, okay, it's done, I don't need to look at it. Think about how we can add some of our own personal knowledge and experience into this to really help supercharge that description to answer the questions that we know the customers ask that AI might not know yet to get a really fine-tuned product description that's going to help the visitor of the website. I think Mikey's hitting it, right? The idea there is that it's augmentation.

7:42It's a supplementation. It's not a replacement. And I think that in your example, it's like, let's try all the voices. Let's see which one works best with us. And then you can make a custom one too. You can even put special instructions to like include a quote from this person or that person. But it's about tuning it, getting it to the right place and like really having it reflect your brand. And we don't want you to use the thing that just came out of the box. You can, but we want you to be able to configure it and make it your own and really be true to your own brand voice. So what is it then?

8:16Why is it that sometimes when you bring up AI to you. Let's just use the example of your employees. Why is it intimidating, do you think? It's just something so new, right? So AI, I don't even feel like we're on day one of really what AI is going to do for us in the next five, 10 years. I mean, today it's so new. So they've heard about it on TV and everything else. Podcasts like this. Yeah. I mean, they're just intimidated. They don't know exactly what it is. They've just heard about it.

8:52So for them to think that they're actually using it, it's something new. And generally, you know, as an entrepreneur myself, look, I can just jump out there and just use all sorts of technology. I'm not afraid anymore. If I mess something up, oh, well, I messed something up. But for a staff member that's not really has that same spirit as myself, it is a little bit intimidating. But once they get into it, they're just like, oh, wow, Mikey, this is really cool. I actually remember the first time we launched a product, We launched our new Flatirons and I used Shopify Magic for the description. And I posted it in our base camp to say, hey, guys, here's the new product.

9:27Here's the, you know, here's the information about it. And they were just like, oh, my God, that product description is so good. Yeah, nice job, Mike. Yeah, and then I was just like, oh, yeah, that wasn't, it was kind of me, but it was AI helped. And they're just like, wait, what's AI? Because it was just, you know, months ago at this point. So pretty exciting stuff, to be honest. Brings a huge smile to my face to like hear the actual merchant story on that one. Like that was the idea. Like we wanted to make it so that it wasn't intimidating, so that it was like approachable. And to the previous example, for those that are familiar with ChatGPT, you aren't typing what's effectively a prompt.

10:04And there's this whole field called prompt engineering that's kind of spun up as a result of it. But we've taken that away. We've made it that all you really got to do is know your product and know your brand and know your voice and know who you want to talk to. And that's it. So all of the things you're already great at, we just want to accelerate you. We want to accelerate you. That's the message here from McDodd Jaffer. He's the director of product at Shopify, also chatting with Mikey Moran, the CEO of Private Label. One of the tools, McDodd, that is really rad is Sidekick. In the back end of Shopify, it's always there.

10:37It's kind of like a new and improved Microsoft Clippy, if you remember that from Microsoft Word. But this is next level. It can actually help merchants with things like product descriptions, emails. So, Midod, tell us how this tool actually works. I think Clippy was ahead of his time. I think it was a good idea to want to put something like that in place, but I think it was early. And technology wasn't at a place where it could take advantage of it. And I think the other thing Clippy did was it interrupted you. And I'm trying to write an email. Oh, it was absolutely rude. And it was like, looks like you're writing an email.

11:12Oh, yeah, I am. Like, that's cool. who are you and why are you here? Are you going to help? Right.

11:23I think we tried to change that. And I think that what Sidekick is attempting to do is like, one, the technology is here. And as you said earlier, it's not just about like generating text, but you know what else is text? Code. And being able to generate code is a really powerful thing, especially when you built a platform for so many years that anyone can build anything on. And like having the baseline of Shopify be driven with things like Liquid, with things like ShopifyQL, it allows you to do lots of different things in the admin and it allows you to generate text that would otherwise require expertise.

11:57Like not everybody knows how to code, but how can we help you get there faster? How can we accelerate you? And the idea behind Sidekick is behind the scenes, it's there when you need Sidekick to be there, but it's not going to interrupt your flow. And it's also not going to take away your voice. The same thing that we did with product descriptions was we let you drive, we let you determine, and we let you make the final choice of what your buyers were going to see. Same is true with Sidekick. Sidekick's never going to go publish something without your interruption. Sidekick's never going to go do something and change a product or change a layout or give you numbers that make no sense without you being able to review and make sense of it first.

12:36We stay true to the fact that the entrepreneur is in charge of their business. And nothing really changes except for acceleration. Even though being on Shopify Plus, I don't think I have access to Sidekick yet, but I'm excited about it, not just for myself, but we have many different divisions of our business, and we've built a couple thousand stores on Shopify. And one of the things that we struggle with is people always coming back to us for additional support, despite Shopify having amazing 24-7 customer support. But when I saw Sidekick, I said, oh my God. Like I have a lot of experience with web development and everything for 17 years now.

13:15So I'm pretty good, even though this is gonna help with a lot of things and where it's gonna go is gonna be pretty incredible. But for the new Shopify user, when I tell you this is going to save so much time and frustration, it's amazing. So it's gonna be a game changer. I just can't wait to see what it's gonna be able to do. I have a lot of ideas and input what it should do, but it's going to take some time. Tell me more, Mikey. What do you think Sidekick should do? Oh, my gosh. I think it can change prices on the fly. Can it do that? The idea is that any form in Shopify would be one that Sidekick can interact with on your behalf.

13:54Now, having a store with a lot of products, when I tell you how redundant and painful it is to go through and change those prices is really time consuming. So for me, what I see Sidekick doing is saving me so much time. And then the redundant tasks that my staff has to do that it's not something exciting for them. It gets a little frustrating for them. So allowing AI to do that. I think the things that AI can do as far as crunching a lot of the data, and I know it's getting integrated with Shopify inbox and with the email. if it can eventually, for the Shopify inbox, the Shopify chat, be able to feed the actual inbox all your documentation, blog posts, and actually educate it so it's self-learning.

14:43When we get to that point, as far as having 24-7 customer support with your chat, with the Shopify inbox service, that can be really game changer. You know, when to send out emails to specific people, not just, hey, we recommend this time, but we know this person. I mean, when we get real granule with this, it's really, it's going to be unbeatable. We'll definitely talk afterwards once we're ready for early access. I'd love to have you on there. I think one of the things to think about is like a lot of the things that you talked about were, some of them were like bulk operations and trying to like do things in an automated way that would otherwise be like very manually intensive.

15:20Some of those things, like there's other ways that we're going to try to make some of that easier. I think the interesting ones are like, how can I predict certain outcomes? How can I bring AI into being able to forecast for me and make some of those choices? And I think a lot of that will come as well. I think what we're most excited with Sidekick is going to be the ability for, as you said, the user that doesn't know to be able to get the answer they need and the user that doesn't have the skills or onboarding onto a given part of Shopify to be able to supplement that immediately and just get that working.

15:52Your inbox one is great because it's available. So you can check that out. And it's not the 24-7 part. So I do want to go into the fact that we're staying with the notion that you message your buyer. We're not having AI message your buyer on your behalf. We do have instant answers within inbox. And it does already scour all of your policies, all of your documents, all of your products, and all of your conversations. So actually, these are the questions that get asked most often. we should probably make these into a bunch of instant answers. So let's make those available. But the really cool one is when you are chatting with a person, here's a suggestion of what you should say.

16:29Also, they asked about this product. It is available. Here's the link to it. So I think being able to do that and onboard someone into customer support instantaneously is a huge win, and it's actually available now. I'm excited about that. I'll tell you why. I had live chat on the store before, and it was just our store was getting so much traffic. Our staff couldn't reply and keep up fast enough. because they didn't have something like this where it's going to help generate that message, help answer questions ahead of time. So now that it has this, it's something I can bring back without having, you know, like a ton of people there just chatting.

17:03And then when it's slow, they're just kind of sitting there. This is so exciting. I mean, all store owners should really look into this because after doing e-commerce for, you know, 16, 17 years, I've kind of been through a lot. And the customer support is something that can take a lot of time and is so incredibly important for your business. It's the same as putting an actual associate in the retail store. It's just like I can help a customer right when they're having an issue. So I think it's huge for that too. Well, it sounds like you two have a budding friendship. I can just get out of here.

17:32We don't need me anymore. Anyway, I'm chatting with McDodd Jaffer, director of product at Shopify and Mikey Moran, the CEO of Private Label. There is so much more that we have to get into in this episode. But before that, I want to take a moment and thank you. Yes, you for listening. to this edition of Shopify Masters. By the way, Shopify Sidekick, it's just one of more than 100 product releases and updates that we rolled out during Summer Editions 2023. To learn more, check out shopify.com slash editions. Gentlemen, we've talked a lot about Shopify's new or improved AI tools. You've heard how a Shopify merchant, Mikey, is using AI, but we haven't yet talked about some of the shortcomings because they do exist.

18:17for example, accuracy. If I'm using AI to respond, for example, to a customer's email to fill out product descriptions, does this need fact-checking? Do I need to, if I'm a merchant, do I need to go through and look at this or can I just press send? I think you should always look at it. I think it still represents you. And I think that there are, the word is hallucination. The AI is prone to being able to hallucinate every now and then. And sometimes that is facts. And sometimes that is information that you know to be quite true. It sounds very convincing when it does so. So that's the other thing to think about.

18:53We've tried to minimize and mitigate that as much as possible. But another reason for putting it in front of the merchant to review ahead of time is because that isn't 100%. And it is important that merchants look at it. And that's why it's like, we're not replacing anybody. This is an accelerant, and it'll probably get you 90 % of the way there. But that last 10 % is really important. And so, Mikey, how do you look for those things? Because if it looks really good, sometimes for an employee, for example, or even for yourself, it could be hard to find it, right? Because it looks so good. How are you training your staff to kind of look for some of these so-called hallucinations?

19:28It's basically our personal knowledge goes into these descriptions and anything else AI can do, I think is really important. What I also tell them to do is use Grammarly to make sure the punctuation and everything is correct. at Grammarly Pro is the best, like$120 you could ever spend. And I did have the conversation because there is a lot of talks with the staff. They're like, oh my God, this AI is crazy. Is it going to replace me? And I say, no, it's not going to replace you. It's going to make you twice as valuable because of all the stuff that you're going to be able to get done in a day. So then I can probably pay you more once it starts working.

20:04And they're like, oh, wow, I like AI. Like you have to have that conversation with your team to really explain to them, this is not to replace you. This is to give you superpowers.

20:21I think you have to put in your own personal input. And over time, I know it's going to get a little bit better. But honestly, where it is today is just absolutely mind blowing. I mean, if you just told me a few years ago that we'd be able to do something like this, I'd be like, there's no way. So, I mean, yeah, incredible. And Don, if I can, just back to this concept of looking for errors, but also accurately representing you. And when I say you, I mean the business. In Mikey's case, selling hair extensions. How do you make sure that you maintain your own personal style and voice when interacting with AI?

20:57Because let me tell you, I've used it myself. And I think if you're not using AI right now, especially generative AI, you're doing yourself a disservice. But sometimes I'm like, that's not me. Right. That doesn't sound like me. So how do you kind of look for that? And how do you augment it? I think a lot of it is you got to play. And a lot of it is you got to try. And I think Mikey gave a great example of the fact that like, let's try all the voices and see which one sounds right. And then like, let's make some adjustments. And those adjustments, they're not necessarily going to be in grammar or tone of voice, but it could just be in like length.

21:30Like you might be the person that wants to talk a lot longer or you want to actually be more brief or you want to make sure that like things are formatted a certain way because this is how you want to represent products.

21:46Some of that is like stylistic choices. Some of it is like how do I make sure that the key facts that I wanted to represent are represented. And in the case of merchants that are in the food and beverage industry, some of that is like the ingredients are very important. The source of the ingredients is very important. All of those specifics are things that you look out for because you're the expert. AI isn't the expert in your business. You still are. The nice thing with Shopify Magic is we gave you the ability to, there's a special instructions field, write what you want. So if you want to say, sound a little bit more casual or be brief or use a hundred words or use 10 ,000 words, like it'll try.

22:23At some point we recommend you use 10 ,000 words, but you get the idea. And Mikey, have you had any experience with that? I mean, how have those fields worked for you? I actually haven't played too much with the custom because we have bullet points of all the key features of our products. It's more where we struggle within the company. It's more of that introduction to kind of really hook them into the product. And that's where Shopify magic comes in because it is so much better than myself and most of my staff. So it's just a matter of getting that and then putting in, doing some light tweaks.