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E148: Richard Harris

How AI is Transforming the eCommerce Industry

richard harris black crow ai black and white portrait photo

eCom@One Listen on Spotify

Podcast Overview

Is AI coming to steal your job?

No. 

AI is everywhere. Suddenly there are a million and one experts in ChatGPT with it still being relatively new to the market. How does that work?

Richard Harris is an eCommerce expert that has spent years understanding and analysing data. He joins us on this week’s podcast to chat about all things AI and how it is changing the industry.

eCom@One Presents

Richard Harris

Richard Harris is the CEO and Founder of Black Crow AI, a software that helps companies of all sizes improve profitability with the power of machine-learned prediction. They empower eCommerce brand growth by unlocking the hidden value in the customer data they already own.

Richard discusses the impact of machine learning and AI on the eCommerce industry. They delve into the various ways AI is being utilised and the concept of “unleveling the playing field.” The discussion includes the importance of customer acquisition and data quality, as well as the potential downsides and benefits of automating creative tasks like copywriting and photography. 

He emphasises the value of 1st party data and the impact of recent privacy laws and policies. They also touch on the hype around AI and the importance of using it in a unique and smart way to gain an advantage. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of eCommerce and its integration with machine learning and AI.

Topics covered: 

1:33 – How Richard entered the world of AI and eCommerce

3:41 – AI generates magic, but predictions are powerful.

6:16 – How AI is transforming the eCommerce industry

10:13 – Accessible tech levels playing field, input differentiator.

14:02 – Unlocking the value of data 

14:52 – How privacy changes have impacted email marketing 

18:45 – Opt-in rates impact revenue significantly.

20:31 – Biggest impact of brand p&ls and how AI plays a part 

22:01 – Meta and AI 

24:50 – Future job market and how it will be impacted by AI

26:36 – Clients embracing AI for copy creation.

29:34 – Next 12 months in AI 

31:09 – AI advertising levels playing field, advantage plus.

32:34 – Rich data for effective brand management.

33:20 – Book recommendation – Traction 

Richard Hill [00:00:04]:

Hi there. I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome. to episode 148.

Richard Hill [00:00:10]:

In this episode, I speak with Richard Harris, CEO and founder of Black Crow AI, a no code or real time machine learning predictive software that helps companies understand likely customers behavior. In this episode, Richard Tokes all things AI and machine learning and ecommerce. what ecommerce companies need to be aware of and how AI is transforming the industry. What are the biggest challenges that mid market ecommerce companies face when implementing AI? We talk about the changes in the job market from AI, and Richard's thinking on what are the biggest game changers in AI over the next 12 months will be. and, of course, so much more in this one. So if you enjoy this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast. So you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now Let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Richard Hill [00:00:58]:

How are you doing, Richard? of doing very well, Richard. It's a pleasure to be here with you. And you and you. Well, thanks for coming up the show. Looking forward to this. Looking forward to this. Very topical. You can't turn on any piece of social media, let alone a TV magazine, you name it without their the AI popping up. That is true. That is true. Possible to avoid. So looking forward to really getting stuck into that. But I think it'd be good to introduce yourself If you will too, our listeners and tell them how you go into the world of sort of ecommerce and machine learning and AI.

Richard Harris [00:01:30]:

Great. Yeah. So I've been in the I started my career as a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, very data driven organization, But, you know, compared to what's being done now sort of baby analysis, and I left there with a few of my colleagues to start my first startup venture in the tech world. That was almost 20 years ago and have been working in and around digital commerce and transactions for the last 20 years. And in my last company, we for completely different use case and application than what we're doing here at Black Crow, us, which is sort of how do you reduce the risk of certain activities online and it turned out that the best way to mitigate risk was to start doing predictions. And so we had a little skunk works inside of in some of my last companies that started cracking a bunch of very interesting and unsolved problems in machine learning, particularly around predictions from streaming data, so real time data being able to process it as it happens. And so that let off of a foot put out a bit of a light bulb, and that was sort of the inspiration for Black Crow. And yes, we're in the business of real time predictions and getting data in for structure in order for brands, a lot of Shopify brands just to make sure they can make the best decisions and grow their businesses profitably.

Richard Hill [00:03:07]:

Predicting the future, hey. It's like -- Yes. -- crystal ball. It seems like magic,

Richard Harris [00:03:12]:

but it's absolutely doable.

Richard Hill [00:03:15]:

Yeah. And I think, you know, super, super topical right now. How you doing? The matter with the the matter sort of where you turn, as I say, you know, AI and, obviously, chat TPT is sort of a very hot topic, but, obviously, we're in chat TPT aside. You know, there's obviously a lot of other tech AI that's been there for you know, since, I think, 6 the sixties, I think it goes back to, isn't it, from what -- Yeah. Of yeah. Absolutely.

Richard Harris [00:03:41]:

What's so interesting is the current sort of hype cycle around AI, and there've been a few of them before. He is around generative AI. So chatGPT or Google's bard or mid journey, these sort of pieces of software and infrastructure that based on a text prompt can just generate these wonderful things. And it feels magical, right, which is why it's slightly scary but magical goal. And I think that's why so many people have gravitated towards it, and there's so much press about it. What we do is much more behind the scenes. It's about processing massive amounts of data be able to create predictions about what a user or a KPI will do next. And even though it's much nerdier and kind of invisible it has that same magical sense, right, when we come to a brand and we say, you know what? I can now know in advance whether this user who just showed up at your site is part of a population that converts at 70% or part of a population that converts at 0.02 percent, and I can tell you that in advance, like 1 second in advance, to 3 months in advance, you now know this. And as soon as you sort of say like, hey, would you wanna do differently? Right? Your average conversion rate is 3%, but there's actually no 3% people. There's wide variations in future value. if I could tell you in advance who was who, would you wanna do anything different? And the answer is actually yes, I'd like to do everything different. certainly how I spend my marketing dollars, how I merchandise, my discount strategy, you know, what I message people over SMS or email all of these things when you have this additional knowledge, and that's not the only predict the only thing we can predict When you have this knowledge, you can just make much, much better decisions.

Richard Hill [00:05:38]:

I'm sold. You know? That's it. Sign me up. Absolutely. Well, it's easy. It's one click to install, and then you'll have a Fortune 500 grade machine learning -- Yeah. -- platform running on your brand. You can try it. for free anytime you want for a month, and it'll either work or it won't. Oh, well, I'm sure we'll find out soon enough when we will. Yeah. we delve a bit further and, you know, look at look at some things with clients. So -- Yeah. -- how how would you say it's transforming the industry, not not your, you know, Blackrobe AI as a, you know, and the sort of the the largest scope of AI? How is it transforming the industry and the ecommerce industry specifically?

Richard Harris [00:06:16]:

Yeah. So I think there's sort of two ways. If you think about the current wave of generative, which is it's so interesting that a lot of talk in the artificial intelligence and machine learning worlds before a couple years ago. was, you know, okay. Once AI reaches the same intelligence level as a human, artificial general intelligence, okay, no one's gonna have jobs and what's gonna happen and the conversation was always around like universal basic income and then humans will just be creative. Right? We'll just be making art and jewelry and singing and acting. And then the first thing that really hit and captured the the imagination of of, you know, large groups of people is creative stuff. Right? It's generating images. It's like generating songs, videos. So a lot of that sort of got turned on its head. But I think e commerce is taking advantage of a lot of those capabilities, right, if you think about things like email copy or ad copy or copy on your website for a newsletter, the images you wanna test out as you're doing site merchandising or like all of these things can now be generated fast cheap and easy. And so I think a lot of this sort of customer facing, creative side of ecommerce is being getting immediately sort of more efficient and it's a threat for some people in our ecosystem but generally a productivity boon. So that's on the sort of generative side. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, you're okay. Go on. Oh, yeah. What we do is much more on the sort of data processing, the predictive side of AI. and there it really is changing so many things, and it's less new. So people of the giants of e commerce like Amazon or Walmart or Sainsbury and k. They've had custom built machine learning stacks for a few years now. And in general, you would like buy a big tool like Databricks, hire an army of data scientists and data engineers, and build your own stack. And it was letting them literally see into the future of their KPI so they can know, you know, who's gonna buy, who --

Richard Hill [00:08:41]:

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Richard Harris [00:09:17]:

complete the inquiry form, and we will connect our listeners to the pricing team. Right. Let's head straight back to this fantastic episode. Has a long lifetime value. What should I merchandise to the person, how often should I communicate? All these, like, very, very rich sources, but it wasn't really accessible to the middle of the market. If you're a you know, direct to consumer brand with 5,000,000 of sales. You weren't gonna go spend $40,000,000 on a custom machine learning stack. And so that's what we do. We founded it to bring those same tools to the middle of the market. And yeah, when you can predict things like who's gonna buy, who's gonna opt in, who's gonna respond to an offer, all of a sudden the actions you can take, particularly in the marketing realm, are just so much more efficient and that's becoming a very big boon for e commerce.

Richard Hill [00:10:13]:

Yeah. I think that's I think you mentioned, like, accessibility, you know, that that some of this tech, not just yours, but, you know, what you can do now with various you know, you mentioned the the usual corporate channel to chat to BTs and whatnot. you know, the what you can do now is just very accessible, isn't it? For free in in in most instances, you know, at a certain level, which is still very, very good. Whereas just to be able to have any level of sort of, you know, sort of machine learning AI would have taken a know, an army of developers coders maybe 5 years ago and an understanding that's a certain level that most, you know, mid size ecom stores, e is, you know, the people we're talking to just wouldn't have access to. Exactly. So now it's sort of you know, it's really opened it up, hasn't it? You know, that that now, the the 5 man band company or the 50 band or the 500 person company, you know, on a DTC level, has now got access to some serious technology. So I guess then it's like, well, if everyone has access to the same technology, how do you then also get a an advantage You know, we there's a thing we refer to. It's not it's not our thing. It's a guy called Frederick Valas, unleveling the playing field. So every everyone starts using AI. Everyone starts getting the advantage. it's using is it using the AI and something else? And -- You know? Yeah. -- taking an excellent tool or an excellent script tool, whatever it may be. then if everyone's using the same tech, does it come down to the inputs and the the way you use that tool?

Richard Harris [00:11:43]:

Yeah. I mean, yes and no's. Certainly, you know, if you think of the first wave of apps in Shopify, people had a 1,000,000 different email systems than like the world kind of collapsed into Clavio, And the early adopters of Klavio had just a better, more efficient product, but then everyone kinda got there. In data, it's a little bit different. Like, some of that and I'm happy to talk about the individual ways that commerce companies can use these predictions to move the needle on their P and L. And what's most important though I think is that having access, like there's this asset that brands have, that e commerce companies have, which is their own 1st party data, meaning all the activity, the behavior of their users, the way they sign up for their emails, the way they interact with their ads, their purchase history, etcetera and that is something that is unique to that brand, but not everyone uses it, not everyone puts it to use and changes in the privacy landscape and all the stuff Apple is doing is making it even harder to put to use. And we saw that in our own business I think people are getting the message that data is, the new oil, data is gold, getting your 1st party data house in order is very important, and that's something we now do. We just launched a new piece of infrastructure for brands to do exactly that because if you're not, capturing, storing, and then accessing all of your first party data, you're missing a big piece of the picture and that's a huge that's a huge unique asset that every brand has.

Richard Hill [00:13:37]:

Yeah. No. Totally. So I think it'd be good to give us some examples then. So, obviously, you've worked with a lot of brands. Yes. You know, give us a sort of maybe a breakdown best you can, you know, and tell us what you know, sometimes a little bit challenging because I mentioned names and whatnot. But, you know, how you've helped you know, brands that'll be similar to our listeners, you know, sort of unlock the value in their data to -- Sure. -- increase the various, you know, like, whether it's lifetime value, warehouse, etcetera.

Richard Harris [00:14:01]:

Yep. So I think, like, the very basic so we we sell machine learning and data infrastructure to people who don't really care about learning and data infrastructure. So we always hit ourselves like keep it simple. We're a bunch of nerds, not everyone cares, It's at the very top line, right, if you think about paid channels and own channels. In paid channels, we can increase, say, ROAS by about 30% using machine learning and data infrastructure. And if you think about own channels like Play or email SMS, etcetera, you can increase your revenue by about 50% coming from those channels. And again, to do this, it's free to try if it doesn't work for you, which is very rare, then whatever don't have to pay anything. But let's go a little deeper. What am I talking about? So let's take email, for example. So we do two things with email first is that sort of persistent identifier, the infrastructure I was talking about, which is with all the changes Apple has made in particular, it's become almost impossible for brands for e commerce companies to recognize their own users, even if they've purchased before or signed up for the email newsletter or for SMS alerts, when that user comes back to your store because cookies now expire after 1 day or 7 days, there's no way to recognize that user as your most loyal customer or someone who shopped and add a bunch of things to carton. So there's all this insight that you actually own, it is your first party data, all that historical behavior of data, that you're sort of cut off from accessing because of all these privacy changes. So we released something called SmartID, which is a privacy first persistent identifier. It's set by the brand. at the DNS level, so it's really their own data and that enables you to all of a sudden recognize all of your visitors when they come back. k, why does this matter? Well, if you take, for example, email marketing, in the past before all these privacy changes and Apple started walling up their garden, Someone would come, they would sign up for your email newsletter. When they came back 2 weeks later, they might add something to the cart but not check out. So you would have a set of email flows or cadences that you would send out to that person like reminding them or maybe noting there's a sale on for this product you looked at. and now brands just aren't able to do that, so what we're able to do is increase impression problem, this lack of persistent identifiers with the new infrastructure that we've put out there, brands can now recognize their users And that means that you're able to send many, many more, sort of like 50% more, 100% more, Users can be identified, right? You know who they are and oh, actually they did buy before. They did sign up for my email newsletter. so you can get back to doing those standard cadences and that's just a huge increase in revenue potential. Brilliant. So

Richard Hill [00:17:21]:

Does it so you talk about email. So then does it work with the part email companies like you've mentioned Klabia? Or -- Yes. Yeah. It's just it's all set up. It's literally 1:1 o'clock. Lot of lot of listeners that use Clovio. We have a -- Yes. -- we use it -- Yeah. They're

Richard Harris [00:17:39]:

they're great, but yeah, we're set up out of the box to just work directly with Klaviyo, so We make sure that Glavio has access to these identities that we were able to restore, and now you can go through your standard cadences. Again, that really can generate 30 percent to 50 percent more revenue from those channels. And then we have another product that actually helps you sign up, gets more people to opt in to your email or SMS alerts. And that's by predicting for this user, when is the right time to get that light box up asking them to sign up? Or what is the right discount to offer? because it's a very standard sort of thing to offer, x percent off when you sign up, how many times should you show it, so just getting the timing and the offer right by user can increase opt ins just very, very significantly and that means more users to recognize, more it's just a a virtual circle that can really meaningfully

Richard Hill [00:18:45]:

impact your your revenue. After I admit, we spend about 45 minutes yesterday with our Clavio internal team looking at the different opt in rates of various different industries. that we're working just to look enough. So, you know, obviously, the difference between, you know, a 5 and a 6% opt in on a, you know, a million views a month or whatever it may be. Massive. insane, you know, and translates to however many probably have, well, 100 of 1000 of pounds or dollars or 1,000,000 if you're, you know, if you're in a a very large sort of DTC. So, yeah, difference between them serving a opt in at a certain point or another. I've seen all sorts of tech out there that can do sorts of things based on at a conversation with somebody a while ago, you know, and their options change depending on the processing power of their opt in forms changed on depending on the processing power of the PC that it's being rendered on. Yep. It's pretty impressive. I didn't know that was even a possible.

Richard Harris [00:19:41]:

But What was the logic for that?

Richard Hill [00:19:44]:

I think it's just that if if people are on older computers, that things were just a little bit clunkier and not loading. So the idea being -- I see. I see. The bet that that the poppers would or the forms would load a lot better on sort of older technology. So it's probably not. Yep. that much, but just give it maybe a little bit of a extra percent here and there. But yeah. Right. Right. So What are some of the other areas in ecommerce that you've seen sort of AI being used or other things that our listeners just think about? So We've chatted on, you know, you on the on different things around chat to PT and around copy and optimizing sort of copy and there. are some of the maybe a bit more outlandish things or things that you see that people are using, you know, AI for ecommerce?

Richard Harris [00:20:31]:

Yeah. I mean, I think maybe the it's not super outlandish, but one of the ones that has the biggest impact on brand P And Ls is in their customer acquisition, right, in Meta, all the meta channels, Facebook, Instagram are for many, many brands, big sources of customers, and getting that CAC LTV equation right is often life or death for many folks. And so we've seen when you, as I was talking about earlier, when you know the future value of the user, right, you can predict if they're gonna buy or repeat buy or churn if you're a subscription company. When you have that knowledge in advance, you can make your your ad buying decisions much, much more granular and effective, right? Because there'll be for that segment of users that's going to convert at 60%, wanna make sure you're in front of them if you run into them on Facebook or Instagram. For that, the bottom three segments that are very, very unlikely to convert, you don't wanna just stop spending in social channels or search altogether. So you can now do that. And I'd say, like, the same thing we were talking about on Klavia where being able to recognize your users so you can take action on them. The same thing is true in Facebook, right? In the Meta platforms, the fact that cookies have expired have meant that quality of data that brands can send to Facebook so that Facebook gets their own algorithms right on who to bid on and how much that has also declined as Apple. Everyone knows, Tim Cook's been tryna punch Mark Zuckerberg in the face for a while. And with the smart idea I was talking about earlier, you can actually restore your ability to send high quality events and increase your match rate. and so you feed much, much, much better data into Facebook. And in turn, if you're, say, using ADDvantage Plus Facebook's own ML systems can make much better decisions because they have better data and that's where you get the sort of 30% plus in ROAS. Sounds good. Increases. ROAS increases.

Richard Hill [00:22:53]:

That's a lot, obviously. Are you are you seeing much around sort of image image sort of optimized not optimization, but the use of AI and imagery in ecommerce.

Richard Harris [00:23:06]:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think even so there's very simple examples where just like product product images are being generated, even if you have a crappy image you took on your phone, you can get the background and 3 d and just completely automated through spacing. There's a few different companies out there that will do this for you and it's not too expensive. Also in in marketing imagery as well, a lot of people are using take this core, whether it's a product or a theme or and now generate a new image for me that I can use, and you can generate so many of them that you can test these things

Richard Hill [00:23:49]:

in real time. That's an interesting one because it sort of leads me onto a question I was gonna ask you in a in a bit, but I'll ask you now. And I think it ties in well. You know? So that example of know, taking an image and then creating a 3 d moving image. Well, you know, I go to a lot of exhibitions and have done for many years in the ecommerce space, and there's a company there that sell these light boxes that you put your product in, and they create that for you. Well -- Mhmm. -- go Fast forward to today and probably in a few months time, will that business still be in business? Will that the person that runs that on probably reframe that. You know, they're, you know, they're a lot of industries are gonna are changing very, very quickly, aren't they? So in terms of, like, the the careers and the jobs that people are doing now, in certain is. You know, what are your thoughts on that? You know, a certain industry should need to, I believe, really need to embrace, or they're gonna get completely left behind. And probably gonna struggle. We know what are your thoughts on the sort of future of the of the job mark job market in the certain areas?

Richard Harris [00:24:49]:

Yeah. I mean, you know, it it's It's hard to see, everyone was worried about truck drivers a few years ago. But now in the fields we were talking about earlier, copywriting, like photography, there's gonna be, I think, 2 things happening. So one is existing professionals are just gonna get much, much more productive, right? Like the first draft of everything will be written by ChatGPT. And so whereas if you have a copywriter on your team or at your agency, whereas maybe they could handle 5 projects per week, now they can handle 50, right? And so that will reduce the need for copyrightors generally. So that's one and there's many areas like translations already been very but even in law in like there's that sort of productivity increase. And then there are other places where you see this sort of you don't need to be a professional anymore. So there's this sort of like downgrading of skills required to achieve the same output and also in creative areas now. So there's the professionals getting more efficient and then just entire lack of need for professionals because amateurs are filling the gap now. Sort of like, you know, take the picture on your iPhone, and it's great. to be on your website. Really model. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Put a prompt in and your email you know, your marketing email is sent. Put another prompt in. Your ad copy is done. Right. So I think some of those things but both of those forces are in our world I think gonna have a pretty big impact.

Richard Hill [00:26:36]:

Yeah. It's interesting where it'll go. I know we're seeing you know, we have a copy and copy writing team You know? And now we're we are using chat GBT, you know, have been for a long time in the business. And, you know, now we're doing certain certain projects have got a lot more output, but they did have, you know, and a lot a lot of time is now spent editing and checking and tweaking and, you know, as you said, you know, that first draft will be generated with a really good set of prompts, you know, very well. Yeah. And, you know, another minute of tweaking, well, you're going into a space there where there's you know, you're selling whatever it may be for on an ETC store, and you need you've got 10,000 SKUs. Well, what better way than using AI to create, you know, what might be a million words and 20,000 photos, do that manually. You'll need another half a £1,000,000 or whatever it may be. Right. Right. So know, we've got clients that have just said go all in, you know, go absolutely all in with the AI. You know? And we're obviously been treading carefully in in and vary on vary with various clients and working closely with clients on what we will do and won't do. But as the months roll on, we're doing more and more and more with the AI. You know? because we're seeing the results that go with it. You know? If we can -- Yeah. -- we've got clients where we've added 500 FAQs in in 24 hours to our website, whereas 6 months ago even, you know, that wasn't very much a manual process where we spend 2 weeks doing that, maybe or thereabouts. So Yeah. System 1, isn't it? You know, where -- It's so interesting. Yeah. And it's not that we're just at the very beginning.

Richard Harris [00:28:09]:

Like, you know, in the world where my colleagues and I inhabit every day. There's a few email newsletters on AI, that come out every day and there's just this breathless string of breakthroughs. And for every chat GPT or Bard or mid journey out there, there's something free and open source that all kinds of just curious developers all over the world are working on, and they're just releasing stuff at a frantic pace. Yeah. I keep saying, like, you know, that you turn LinkedIn on on, and, obviously, everything's our eye, but

Richard Hill [00:28:45]:

I saw something, like, about a week ago, and they said in April or something like, you know, 500 new different tools were released You know? But it's probably gonna be 5000 in June probably. You know? And -- Yeah. No. It's gonna be exponential,

Richard Harris [00:28:58]:

just like the technology.

Richard Hill [00:29:00]:

Yeah. You know, I gotta go to a lot of different marketplaces for software, and and then we've got a sort of a an agreed budget internally every month. We're testing different things, and It's the the amount of new tools that are coming out. It's just insane. But, obviously, now, you know, you got access to different APIs and linking things together. It's just like, pretty crazy what you can do. Okay. So crystal ball time then. We sat here in 12 months. You know, what do you think are gonna be some of the biggest advancements, biggest things that our listeners need to look out for and maybe get on over this next 12 months.

Richard Harris [00:29:33]:

Yeah. I mean, I think very specifically AI or not, getting your 1st party data house in order is critical, right? Because the pace of change in the ecosystem. Right? No one knows what Apple is gonna do next. Google has said they also wanna move to a cookieless world. So that's gonna kind of happen, but I think making sure that you own this unique asset that's yours, your first party data, and make the most of it. And again, you don't need to hire data scientists. There's companies out there that can help you take advantage of this. Black Crow is 1, but there are others out there. And I would just say like, it is this treasure that you're sitting on, and I think it's gonna be quite perilous to not take advantage of it. So that's number 1. Number 2 is I think like automation and a lot of things that happen inside of your company today inside of your store today, there are going to be automated versions of it. So any process you run any decision you need to make, action you need to take repeatedly. There will be good and bad versions, but automated versions of these things. start exploring now because I think as brutal as it sounds, automation is really a an advantage, right? If you can take some element out of your cost structure that your competitor can't or won't you're just gonna be at an advantage.

Richard Hill [00:31:09]:

Mhmm. Totally. Yeah. It's I love it. I love it because I just it takes me back to, like, maybe 4 years ago. Yeah. There's a lot of sort of performance max type. Yep. you know, on the on the Google Google Ads, a lot of automation. No. It wasn't performance, man. It was before that. Right. And everyone's, oh, no. We can we can outsmart you know, we can do better than you know, we we can the manual sort of side of things. And then as the months rolled on and rolled on, everyone's adopting, you know, the the AI. And that's you know, it's just -- And now it's in Advantage Plus on Facebook as well. That's just so good. You know? Sort of and just trying to use it in a smart way like anything, isn't it? It's it's to, you know, how you're driving it and how you're using it and maybe adding something to it and have your own spin on it. I know it's not quite depends what we're talking about exactly, but just sort of leveling that playing field, as I said earlier. I can get a bit of an advantage if everyone is writing in their product descriptions using ChatPT. ChatPT. Right. It's obviously it's about the import what import you put in. You know, whether you're using the an additional API from here using this, using the data from Google search console to drive the to read the Google guidelines and so on and so on so on. So you you've got a a variant of an AI or something like that, which is giving you that extra advantage. Yeah. Yep. And I think, you know, that that move, you know, advantage plus performance max, you know, that is AI on their end, but you

Richard Harris [00:32:34]:

meet as a brand, you need to make sure that you are feeding those with the best most accurate, richest data so that they can work more effectively. And that sort of identifier, smart ID that I was talking about, that is the best way to do that is to make sure that you know who your users are, you can store and log and analyze the data about them, and also feed it to the places where you're spending a lot of money, right, so that they can make better decisions for you. So it's just so critical.

Richard Hill [00:33:05]:

No. Totally agree. So I'd like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Do you have a book richard to recommend to all of us? I do. There's a book for running

Richard Harris [00:33:14]:

your own business. I know you have a lot of folks who run their own e commerce businesses. There's a book called traction by Gina Wickman. And I don't know if you've heard of it, but it is a oh my god. That's so funny.

Richard Hill [00:33:28]:

That is unbelievable.

Richard Harris [00:33:31]:

On the top of my pile right here. Yeah. No. It is such a great book and just breaks down so many internal easy about how to get to predictable revenue. And ecommerce is a little harder because of that CAT LTV equation. But there are things you can do and ways you can run your business that will take a lot of uncertainty out of it. That's genius. That's brilliant. That's a brilliant recommendation.

Richard Hill [00:33:54]:

Yeah. 2nd now well, thanks for coming on the show, Richard. For those that wanna reach out to you, find out more about Black Crow. What's the best way to do that? Yeah. You can always send me an email r@blackgrow.

Richard Harris [00:34:05]:

Or if you wanna try out AI for free for 30 days and see it move the needle on your P and L, just go to our website blackro.ai,

Richard Hill [00:34:13]:

and you can sign up for free. Great stuff. Well, thank you for that. I look forward to seeing you again. Alright. Cheers. Take Thank you for listening to the ecom at 1 ecommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe, and don't forget to sign up to our ecommerce newsletter that leaves a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here atecomone, the ecommerce marketing agency.

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