Your New Shopping Assistant: A Good Boy

Welcome to this week’s session. I’ve got some very interesting news & reads for you.

Amazon’s New Shopping Assistant is a… Good Boy?

Amazon started rolling out its new Gen-AI powered conversational shopping assistant, Rufus.

Trained on Amazon’s product catalogue and the internet at large, Rufus can answer customer questions on shopping needs, products, and comparisons, make recommendations based on this context, and facilitate product discovery, all in the same Amazon shopping experience customers use regularly.

Every time you want to purchase shoes, you go to YouTube and maybe some sports blogs. With Rufus, you can do everything from broad research at the start of a shopping journey such as “what to consider when buying running shoes?” to comparisons such as “what are the differences between trail and road running shoes?” to more specific questions such as “are these durable?”.

Here’s a quick demo 👇️ 

How does it impact me? 

Rufus will make shopping easier by helping customers discover new products and research their options. In the long run, Amazon can get e-commerce businesses to pay to get more favourable comparisons with their competitors by greasing Rufus’... paws. 

Read all about it here. 

I was quite tickled by the name, though. Why did Amazon name it after a dog? 

I did some digging and found out that the original Rufus was Amazon's former editor-in-chief and principal engineer’s pet. He was the original Amazon dog, their “shortest volunteer worker”, and the reason behind the tech giant’s friendly doggo policy. 

So wholesome! 🥺 

Bard Ate DALL·E 3 For Breakfast

Google announced access to its generative image creation tool “Imagen 2” inside of Bard, and it’s quite promising.

Here are some deep-dives on the technical abilities of both:

• Deep-dive 1

• Deep-dive 2

My thoughts: 

• Copilot's DALL·E 3-powered image generation offers overly softened and smooth images that feel slightly dream-like or aspirational, with a very 'rendered' feel to them.

• Both Imagen 2 and DALL·E 3 are better at illustrations than photorealistic images.  

• Since this isn’t Bard Advanced, the version powered by Gemini Ultra, Google’s equivalent to GPT-4, we can expect Bard to get better very quickly.

Either way, it’s a great free tool which gives quick results. 

AI Day Of the Week?

It seems like companies want their employees to increase their productivity through AI tools, but they fail to realise the time and effort it takes to learn a tool, judge its efficacy when compared to manual execution, and seamlessly add it to their workflow. 

One of the exceptions is Zapier. Their founder claimed they give all employees one day "off of their day job" to figure out how to use AI. 

The results speak for themselves.

Wondering how to power your marketing team? Here’s how Zapier’s Head of Communications uses a combination of Zapier + ChatGPT to generate PRs. 

If you do wish to encourage such experiments at your org, Asana put together this list of ideas to encourage AI adoption in your employees. I am keen on providing this as a service in the long run, but more on that later.

Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts on the issue and what you’d like to see next! 

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Until then, go through all the links I shared.