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AI tools can help small business owners design digital storefronts, market to customers, and protect online information. Getty Images/Thana Prasongsin

Artificial intelligence has quietly been influencing the way we shop for years. Brands are using AI to predict consumer spending habits, answer customer service requests, and streamline order fulfillment. E-commerce, in particular, is a market segment in which AI can help simplify sales. According to Statista, e-commerce companies are using AI for everything from personalization to forecasting to marketing to fraud prevention.

The tools on this list can help e-commerce companies optimize the overall sales process by bringing traffic to the site, reducing cart abandonment rates, and streamlining order fulfillment and delivery.

AI can help match customers to the products theyre looking for, as well as encourage them to browse items they didnt know they wanted.

Clerk uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer behavior to personalize the sales process in a way that grows sales by 1530%. The Clerk algorithm personalizes the shopping experience, using data from visitor behavior, trends, and transactions to present e-shoppers with the most relevant search results, product recommendations, and much more. It works with popular e-commerce platforms including Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.

[Read more: How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Changing How Marketers Sell Everything From Food to Fashion]

Syte is another platform that uses AI to optimize the shopping experience. Tailored to the needs of e-commerce jewelry, home decor, and fashion retailers, Sytes visual AI helps customers find the products that theyre looking for faster. It can provide product recommendations based on what the user has been browsing.

Similarly, Phrasee uses AI to generate marketing messages across the customer journey. When a customer is browsing a certain product line, Phrasee can recommend a complementary product or send through a free shipping offer. Its an especially powerful tool for lowering cart abandonment rates.

E-commerce storefronts have the unique challenge of being always open unlike brick-and-mortar stores, shoppers can browse your website at midnight, during a holiday, or while youre on vacation. AI-powered chatbots help keep things running by fielding customer queries and troubleshooting basic service needs so you never miss a sale.

Great for startups, Reetail will help write product descriptions, offer marketing ideas, and even generate social media ads.

Netomi provides a range of artificial intelligence solutions that help address customer needs. Netomi can do everything from explaining a returns policy to finding the right size product to managing order modifications and shipping updates. Netomi can also foster customer loyalty with well-timed discounts and proactive care.

Manychat is a similar tool that automates customer conversations through Instagram Direct Messages, on Facebook Messenger, and via SMS. Manychats AI can field frequently asked questions on these channels to increase engagement and lead generation. The brand claims that these automated conversations lead to click-through rates 130% higher than the industry average.

E-commerce businesses process customer and payment data, making them an enticing target for hackers and malware. And, unfortunately, small businesses in particular fall victim to online fraud attempts.

Riskified is designed to protect e-commerce businesses from fraud. It works behind the scenes to ensure all transactions are above board and reduce chargebacks, identifying the individual behind each transaction. Riskified promises revenue growth for businesses that implement its solution to protect their customer data.

Likewise, Signifyd is designed to instantly recognize good shoppers and approve 59% more orders, on average. Its proprietary AI uses a huge dataset of previous global transactions to spot patterns and catch fraud attempts before they hit your bottom line.

[Read more: Top Supply Chain Tips from Inventory Management Experts]

Reetail's AI helps you get a website set up and launched quickly. Great for startups, Reetail will help write product descriptions, offer marketing ideas, and even generate social media ads. Its integrated with Stripe, so your website can start accepting orders sooner rather than later.

Looking for deeper customer insights? You might want to try Spatial, an AI tool that unites data from online and offline sales in one clear picture. Omnichannel brands can personalize offers to previous customers and anonymous website visitors to supercharge digital and social campaigns, the website promises. Use Spatial to improve targeting, develop new products, and understand shopper behavior on a deeper level.

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Published September 15, 2023

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AI and E-commerce: Simplifying the Sales Process - CO by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Youd have to be pretty brave to bet against the idea that applying more computing power and data to machine learninga recipe that birthed ChatGPTwont lead to further advances of some kind in artificial intelligence. Even so, youd be braver still to bet that combo will produce specific advances or breakthroughs on a specific timeline, no matter how desirable.

A report issued last weekend by the investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts that a supercomputer called Dojo, which Tesla is building to boost its work on autonomous driving, could add $500 billion to the companys value by providing a huge advantage in carmaking, robotaxis, and selling software to other businesses.

The report juiced Teslas stock price, adding more than 6 percent, or $70 billionroughly the value of BMW and much less than Elon Musk paid for Twitterto the EV-makers market cap as of September 13.

The 66-page Morgan Stanley report is an interesting read. It makes an impassioned case for why Dojo, the custom processors that Tesla has developed to run machine learning algorithms, and the huge amount of driving data the company is collecting from Tesla vehicles on the road, could pay huge dividends in future. Morgan Stanleys analysts say that Dojo will provide breakthroughs that give Tesla an asymmetric advantage over other carmakers in autonomous driving and product development. The report even claims the supercomputer will help Tesla branch into other industries where computer vision is critical, including health care, security, and aviation.

There are good reasons to be cautious about those grandiose claims. You can see why, at this particular moment of AI mania, Teslas strategy might seem so enthralling. Thanks to a remarkable leap in the capabilities of the underlying algorithms, the mind-bending abilities of ChatGPT can be traced back to a simple equation: more compute x more data = more clever.

The wizards at OpenAI were early adherents to this mantra of moar, betting their reputations and their investors millions on the idea that supersizing the engineering infrastructure for artificial neural networks would lead to big breakthroughs, including in language models like those that power ChatGPT. In the years before OpenAI was founded, the same pattern had been seen in image recognition, with larger datasets and more powerful computers leading to a remarkable leap in the ability of computers to recognizealbeit at a superficial levelwhat an image shows.

Walter Isaacsons new biography of Musk, which has been excerpted liberally over the past week, describes how the latest version of Teslas optimistically-branded Full Self Driving (FSD) software, which guides its vehicles along busy streets, relies less on hard-coded rules and more on a neural network trained to imitate good human driving. This sounds similar to how ChatGPT learns to write by ingesting endless examples of text written by humans. Musk has said in interviews that he expects a Tesla to have ChatGPT moment with FSD in the next year or so.

Musk has made big promises about breakthroughs in autonomous driving many times before, including a prediction that there would be a million Tesla robotaxis by the end of 2020. So lets consider this one carefully.

By developing its own machine learning chips and building Dojo, Tesla could certainly save money on training the AI systems behind FSD. This may well help it do more to improve its driving algorithms using the real-world driving data it collects from its cars, which competitors lack. But whether those improvements will cross an inflection point in autonomous driving or computer vision more generally seems virtually impossible to predict.

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Don't Count on Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer to Jump-Start an AI ... - WIRED

The artificial intelligence (AI) market has been growing at an exponential pace over the last couple of years, thanks in large part to consumer-ready products such as ChatGPT, Google Bard and IBM Watson that are now being used commonly across the globe.

To this point, global management consulting firm McKinsey believes that anywhere between 50% and 60% of all organizations today are already making use of AI-centric tools, with this number expected to grow sharply in the near future.

Moreover, as per Forbes, AI is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world today, with the total market capitalization of this space set to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.3% until the end of the decade, reaching a cumulative valuation of $1.81 trillion over the said period.

This rise is not unfounded and is, in fact, being helmed by certain technological trends such as generative AI and natural language processing (NLP) which have led many experts to project that AIs contribution to the global economy will rise to $15.7 trillion by 2030, a figure that is more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of global powerhouses India and China combined.

With the technologys growing importance, market and technological observers have noted several possible trends affecting the AI sector or driven by AI.

As the tech paradigm has continued to expand and grow, the use of AI assistants seems primed to help automate and digitize a wide range of service sectors. Pawe Andruszkiewicz, chief operating officer of VAIOT a developer of AI-powered digital services told Cointelegraph that legal services, public administration and citizen services are just some domains that can be completely revamped using AI.

AI Assistants offer increased availability, lower costs and ease of use for the end-user. Lets take legal services as an example; they are often scary, unavailable or simply too expensive for regular people [...] AI assistants, as a sort of natural user interface, with [24/7] availability via a mobile device, disenchant this area, making it possible to access and obtain legal support for anyone, anytime, he said.

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Andruszkiewicz believes AI assistants can streamline formal legal documentation, process digital signatures or payments, provide users with possible outcomes of various cases, prepare tailor-made agreements, and even deliver corporate services related to compliance or due diligence.

Similar benefits, as per Andruszkiewicz, can be extended to the realm of public administration, including formal processes such as setting up a company, applying for a visa, registering properties or even obtaining various licenses, which are often complicated and require lots of paperwork.

Lastly, he believes AI assistants are great at deciphering more complicated technologies such as the blockchain and smart contracts. With the use of AI, a person doesnt have to be a developer to create stuff on the blockchain. You can simply specify what you want to achieve, and the AI assistant will do the complicated part for you, he said.

Miguel Machado, CEO and co-founder of Keenfolks an AI consulting firm told Cointelegraph that over the next few months, people will be startled by the speed of innovation and how fast AI products are able to scale and reach a wider audience. As an example, he alluded to OpenAI and how its ChatGPT interface did not go live until March 2022, yet today, it has over 100 million users.

The ease of experimenting through different pilots will foster innovation, enabling Fortune 500 companies to swiftly iterate and refine their AI-driven strategies. Communities, too, will play a pivotal role, harnessing the knowledge of language models to create platforms that facilitate collaborative learning and skill enhancement, he said.

Moreover, he even sees a growing number of C-suite executives adopting AI to propel their businesses to new heights, especially within spaces such as law, HR and finance.

The emergence of no-code solutions is set to democratize AI adoption, allowing brands to integrate advanced technologies into their operations without requiring extensive technical expertise, he added.

Over the last couple of years, most AI-based applications have predominantly relied on the use of predictive models, which, as the name suggests, emphasize making predictions or providing insights based on existing data sets. To put it another way, the results produced by these frameworks are derived or recycled and are free of any new content.

On the other hand, generative AI uses machine learning and deep learning to produce original information that has been computed independently using newer patterns built atop existing training data. Over the past year, these models have been extensively used to generate texts, images, and audio and video content.

Talking about the potential of this technology, Henry Ajder, generative AI expert and tech adviser to Meta and Ernst & Young, said, Were still in the nascent stages of this generative revolution; the future will be one where synthetic media is ubiquitous and democratized in daily life, not as a frivolous novelty, but powering groundbreaking advances in entertainment, education, and accessibility.

Another domain of AI that is primed to gain traction over the coming months is that of natural language processing (NLP). This technology serves as the backbone for various tech products that thousands interact with on a daily basis, be they search engines or voice-activated assistants.

Through the use of NLP platforms, it is possible to make machines understand, interpret and respond to human language in a lifelike manner. In fact, the technology utilizes language modeling, parsing, sentiment analysis, machine translation and speech recognition to provide realistic responses for users operating in different business sectors.

The potential of this still-nascent market is highlighted by Grand View Research in its recent report, which suggests that it will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 40.4% from 2023 to 2030, reaching a total capitalization of $439.85 billion by the end of the decade.

According to Forbes, AIs use in healthcare will grow immensely, particularly when it comes to how doctors diagnose and treat patients with various ailments. Moreover, the use of machine learning is projected to rise within domains such as drug discovery and medical research.

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The use of AI in drug discovery is expected to reach $4 billion by 2027 (growing at a CAGR of 45.7%). Similarly, more than 50% of all American healthcare providers have either deployed or are planning to use AI tools, such as robotics process automation, as part of their internal medical processes.

Therefore, as we head toward a future driven by technologies such as AI, machine learning, deep learning and NLP, it stands to reason that their use will grow across various industries, helping usher in a digitized, more automated future.

Link:

5 AI trends to look forward to in 2023 and beyond - Cointelegraph

John Lamb/Getty Images

Since last year, artificial Intelligence has developed from a futuristic concept to a realistic tool capable of creatingAI-generated art, producing human-likeconversations via chatbots, and even identifying backyard birds solely based on their chirps.

That said, AI's recent boom has brought apps and tools to the surface with the potential to make our workflow -- and even our lives -- easier. And according to Gartner Analyst and AI expert Whit Andrews, AI has a leveling effect that is only intensifying, he told ZDNET.

"Think of all the people who find it daunting to express themselves in unfamiliar idioms: that could be drawing a picture, or drawing a map, or explaining a concept," Andrews said. "Generative AI and other AI applications now make that easy, and it has really advanced equality."

That intensification already has a solid foundation as more than 150 AI chatbot apps have been launched in 2023 so far.

While most are familiar big-name apps and software like ChatGPT, I found the following six apps to be the most useful for time and budget management, a fitness routine tailored to your skillset, and even mindfulness. After integrating some of these apps into my own life, I think they're worth talking about.

A Google Chrome extension for time management

It never seems that there are enough hours in the day, but Reclaim.ai can find those time slots in your ever-changing schedule. The app uses AI to find time between your workday and your regular life to weave in your to-dos and healthy habits you're trying to commit to.

It can automatically schedule your meetings and block off time to focus on a specific project too, but I like this AI tool for its habit scheduling. Its AI builds flexibility into your schedule so that instead of saying you will go for a walk every day at 2 p.m., it will automatically schedule it to fit around the other events in your calendar or even reschedule it if a last-minute meeting pops up.

By using AI to automatically build the perfect schedule for your priorities each week, it helps you to stay on track with both your work tasks and the habits you wish to incorporate more into your life that you didn't think you had time for.

Currently, the app only works in conjunction with Google Calendar, but there may be Microsoft Office 365 integration in the future.

An iOS and Android app for budget managing

This AI app was made for Millennials looking for an easy way to budget. Cleo communicates with users via chatting and uses emojis, memes, and GIFs to get the point across when you spend too much on ordering takeout.

Its AI integrates tough love humor, which it calls "Roast Mode" that playfully shames you on how much you've spent or how little you've saved due to certain repetitive habits even a robot knows you should break. Conversely, Cleo can also hype you up and praise you for your good habits.

Also:Unexpected bill? This AI bot can 'Haggle It' for you

Cleo also has a "Haggle It" feature that helps customers draft letters to help negotiate rent, credit card fees or interest rates, or car insurance rates. A survey conducted by Cleo even found that out of the customers who negotiated their credit card fees and interest, about 20% received reduced rates and fees, so it's definitely worth a try.

But overall, the app builds a budget around your real-life needs and spending habits to set you up for financial success.

An app and a Google Chrome extension for practicing screen-time mindfulness

This Chrome extension has become one of my favorite AI tools because it forces me to slow down and take a break during my workday. Breathhh gets to know your browsing history over time and keeps track of how long you've been in a Google spreadsheet (or how long you've been scrolling through social media).

The tool then suggests a practice or exercises like breathing or documenting your mood by offering it at the right time based on how long you've been on a website, what kind of website it is (i.e., for work or for entertainment), and by learning your browsing habits so it can intervene.

I've found this AI extension to remind me when to take a break and reset my mind so I can avoid work burnout.

An AI tool that works behind the scenes of live streaming apps for managing cyber-bullying

95% of teenstoday have been exposed to violent subject matter online. This newAI tool from a partnership with Agoraand ActiveFenceisn't downloadable, but acts as an extension for social media sites or live streaming apps.

The content moderation technology works so that when an app developer activates the extension, it takes screenshot snippets in second-long intervals, passing the images to the ActiveFence content moderation system. Then, the AI flags illicit content in real-time and can even kick a user out.

"What we've done with this integration is provide a low code offering that you click a button, you integrate one or two lines of code, and you are good to go. And you have protected content being streamed through your platform," said Sid Sharma, vice president at Agora. "We really wanted to make the internet and, in specific live interactions on the internet, a very safe place of inclusivity where anybody can go and feel protected and not have to worry about the keyboard warriors."

The AI can identify specific abuse areas like terrorism, hate speech, child safety, self-harm, etc., and flag it to the server in a matter of milliseconds.

"The internet should be a place that people get excited about and feel safe about. So ideally, I would look at this [AI tool] as a necessity for most of the platforms out there," Sharma added. "I would be very hopeful to see a world where live streaming or live video calls are protected, and ensuring utmost safety for the mental health and not providing any distress to every single consumer out there."

An iOS and Android app for creating and maintaining workout routines

When it comes to a fitness routine, starting is often the hardest part. It's hard to know what cardio-weights mix is right for you, what exact plan to follow to achieve any specific goals, or what's even safe given your current skill set without enlisting the help of an expensive trainer or going down the TikTok/Pinterest rabbit hole. Gymbuddy uses AI to analyze your current self-assessed fitness level while taking into account body composition factors like height and weight to curate a specific workout plan and schedule in just 24 seconds.

You can also tell the app which body parts you want to focus on strengthening, and it'll keep track of your advancements and increase your difficulty level as you improve.

The app's handy workout scheduler also builds time into your schedule so you can actually complete the personalized workouts it creates for you during lunch breaks, after work, right when you wake up, etc.

An app and Google Chrome extension for content summarization

Sometimes, we just don't have five minutes to spare to watch an entire article on how to fix a pressing issue, or read an article (unless it's a ZDNET article, of course) on the latest tech or social media trend before jumping on your morning meeting.Wordtune, however, is a handy Chrome extension that uses AI to give you the critical points (or Sparknotes, if you will) of that article or video.

For example, a 3,500-word article turns into 24 simple focus points, so you can save about 10 minutes of reading but still come away with the article's most important information.

Also:How to use Wordtune AI to rewrite texts on your iPhone

Wordtune also has an app version for iOS and Android, and this mobile version can generate content like text messages and emails, photo captions, LinkedIn or Twitter posts, cover letters, blog posts, and more by a simple ask. You can ask Wordtune to write a cover letter applying for your dream job, and it'll generate multiple responses to choose from. Or, more simply, you can ask the AI to write a response to a text message when you just can't figure out how to reply.

Aside from these six tools, there's still a slew of AI applications available to help with productivity and workflow, learn how to develop a new skill, or even create a professional headshot free of charge. And given Andrews' insight, we're only on the cusp of seeing AI's full capabilities.

"A generation from now, people will not remember life before this moment when AI made so many things more equitable," he said. "There are all kinds of things that we'll be able to do, and I love that about AI," said Andrews.

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6 AI tools to supercharge your work and everyday life - ZDNet