Warning – Market Disruption
Amazon doesn’t sleep, at least I don’t think they do. Amazon’s history is full of market disruptions which forced their competitors to race to catch up. This what they do. Sell anything A to Z, got it. Create the digital platform to join sellers to buyers, early success. My package is 8 stops away, whoa, what’s this?
It’s a long list of disruptions, so I won’t belabor it… But it has led all competitors to continually up their game to try and stay with them. Amazon continuously innovates to stay ahead.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but recently Amazon launched “Rufus” in the U.S. for a new shopping experience. Their release memo says it’s a “new generative AI-powered conversational shopping assistant. Rufus is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchase decisions by answering questions on a variety of shopping needs and products—it’s like having a shopping assistant with you any time you’re in our store. We’re pleased to share that Rufus is now available to all U.S. customers in the Amazon Shopping app and on desktop.” https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/how-to-use-amazon-rufus
I’m pleased it’s now here. Why? Because we’ve been talking to potential customers about a Vertical GenAI-based Customer Experience and many have either not believed it’s close to being a differentiator or that it’s realistic. Describing this in envisioned language for a customer and their marketplace has been a challenge. It’s now real… and their competitor has it and will leverage it for a better customer experience and increased potential for sales. This capability just went from a “tomorrow” consideration to a “today” need in order to keep up.
Using Vertical GenAI as the framework, we narrow the perspective of your proprietary domain data to what you sell, your customers, your products, and then interlace that with more general AI to put that information in context creates a valuable concierge to improve customer experience.
Having curated data from your product and domain expertise coupled with new AI capabilities generates that intelligent, conversational interaction you can only get with a one-on-one interaction.
Now we can recreate that seasoned concierge experience for ALL customers through this new technological offering. Through the application of Vertical GenAI, we’ve now replicated the best concierge as digital twins for every customer experience.
As you can see, Rufus is conversational. Rufus is intelligent. Rufus knows our products intimately. Rufus has context of the conversation. Rufus isn’t delaying the conversation to pivot to the next juggled customer like a human. Rufus is the speed of digital.
As a market disruptor, pay attention over the next 12 months to how many of Amazon’s competitors now race to catch up.
McLean Forrester has experience delivering capabilities just like Rufus, which we have productized as an offering to our customers. Understanding the technologies of Vertical GenAI and the data requirements to train and implement this within a customer’s domain is our advantage. This is something that can be a (relatively) quick win for a lot of retail companies and maturity of the capability is absolutely scalable. We can build you a proof concept in a matter of weeks.
Reach out and connect if you want to understand more or would like to conceptually explore how a capability like this can help shape your customer experience. Leave it to Amazon to give us a very tangible mainstream public example to aid our disucssions with clients!
Interested in learning more? Let’s Chat! Contact us at [email protected] or visit mcleanforrester.com
