Key takeaways from the conversation

1. The smartest ecommerce companies are embracing AI. 

This AI thing, it’s a thing. It felt kind of buzzing in the beginning. But as digital executives, we have run some use cases that have shown significant success. We’ve proven that there are efficiencies to gain, there are dollars to gain. Now, it’s our responsibility to educate the business and work strategically to make sure that we’re implementing great tech at the intersection of performance.

– Jenna Flateman Posner, Chief Digital Officer, Solo Brands

2. The Assist – Augment – Automate framework enables retailers to adopt AI gradually and systematically.

There’s potential around AI but (many) are unsure how to get started. (We use) this framework of Assist – Augment – Automate. Assist – how do we start to use these pilots to make our existing team as productive as they possibly can be? Augment – how do we use these pilots and ultimately at scale to augment our teams? And Automate – … more automation means that tasks that previously had to go in front of humans no longer do.

– Mike Dupuis, Chief Digital Officer, SPARC Group

3. Looking to gain leadership support for AI? Demystify it first.

The first step is really understanding what in your existing tech stack is utilizing AI…  to prove that we already have it, we already see value, and to demystify this thing that is AI. It might seem a little obvious, but it took the intimidation factor out of it for the executive team and it brought us all to the same level.

– Jenna Flateman Posner, Chief Digital Officer, Solo Brands

If revenue growth, operating expense reduction, leveraging payroll and other fixed assets and sponsoring a low CapEx innovation agenda are part of the boardroom conversations, then AI fits neatly into all of those things… those are the terms that will resonate in any owners or boardroom conversation.

– Mike Dupuis, Chief Digital Officer, SPARC Group

When it comes to the board tying into partnerships that you already have, whether it’s merchandising tools, email providers, they’re exploring AI at the same time, and they’re looking for partners who want to test and learn with them. So I think doing those types of proof of concepts with partners that you already work with, makes it a much easier sell to a group like that.

– Colleen Waters, Senior Director Ecommerce, Steve Madden

There’s lots of ideas that are floating around and actually getting the learning quickly and being able to have a story around that. Everyone has to have a story about AI. If they don’t have a story about AI they’re going to get left behind.

– Jason Seeba, CMO, Session AI

4. How is AI being used today?

(Merchandising for) our collections on site for both Steve Madden and Dolce Vita are by AI. … It re-ranks itself based on product engagement and conversions. And we tested that against the hand merchandising we were doing before and they were really head to head. … Proving that the (AI) logic worked and we didn’t have to be putting the time of the team into hand merchandising was a huge unlock that opened up the time for other drivers.

– Colleen Waters, Senior Director Ecommerce, Steve Madden

We have started to see some early success in using gen AI to generate dynamic audiences out of CDP, which is showing some really positive early results in terms of the efficiency of those campaigns that are using that technology.

– Mike Dupuis, Chief Digital Officer, SPARC Group