Responding to this week’s piece in which I pointed out some of the deficiencies of AI, MNB reader Bob Wheatley wrote:
Interesting that your story centers on AI generated media pitches. On the one hand, AI shows its ability to track relevant stories you’ve written previously and then steps on its own foot with an irrelevant pitch. For the good of the order, best practices in the PR world promotes the former (research) and eschews the latter (pitch generation) as lazy and fault prone.
That said, while AI commoditizes everything except human imagination, there’s a new and size-able wrinkle that retailers will need to address. What happens when super-smart machines that speak in a friendly voice step in between the retailer and consumer to advise and recommend what products to buy and where to shop, what prices to pay. Moreover we’re not that far away from AI closing the loop to secure purchases and arrange delivery. What many fail to realize is this is a third-party that brings the world’s knowledge to the table to help consumers make decisions. It’s not the retailer’s own voice.
What does the Large Language Model (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) think of the retailer, its strengths/weaknesses, competitors, pricing, assortment, quality, service et al?
Who’s on the recommended list?
Are the stories being told correct or misinformed?
This is actually a very brief list of the kinds of questions retailers need to be thinking about, precisely because their business future is being influenced by a machine, that on occasion gets it wrong or is incomplete.
It is possible to teach and educate the LLMs that are crawling web sites and every source it deems credible and trusted (likely including MorningNewsBeat) for information on which to base its assessments.
This new area of practice, called Agentic Engine Optimization (AEO) should be a centerpiece in every business plan. I wonder if it’s high on the list of priorities? Or do we allow to AI determine destiny? This is only accelerating.
MNB reader Howard Davidson chimed in:
So in response to your post about the influence and use of AI in the areas of “creativity”, let me add one creative writer’s perspective:
I’ve dived deep into many of the various AI applications out there – in fact just got Google Certification in AI – and my experience tells me several things.
1) Once you’ve mastered the art of the prompt, the tools are FANTASTIC at helping jump start ideation, sharpening a strategic focus, better enabling you to look at competitive work and many other things that are part of the creative process.
2) In many head-to-head brainstorms – “me vs machine” – I’ve yet to see where AI can out imagine me. But grudgingly I will say that some of the ideas it can generate are clever, always on strategy and give me a run for the money.
3) For body copy – particularly for social and email – AI is incredibly fast and reliable and tempting to just run with.
4) For email or other general communications, AI lacks the personality of the professional writer. For non-professional writers who typically labor to produce such content, it’s clearly a winning assistant. I would add that I’ve seen AI able to improve its mimicry of my personal-always-humorous approach to writing business or personal emails. But my satisfaction in crafting a good note that will make someone smile can’t be replaced by a machine.
5) “Human-in-the-Loop” is what Google advocates as a best practice and I concur. If you use AI iteratively – think of it as creative partner and sometimes editor – it’s often terrific.
In sum, I think it would be foolish for creatives not to embrace AI as we did word processing and computers and integrate it into our process. It can only make our output better while still giving the pride of authorship and the satisfaction that comes from a well-crafted line or piece of advertising.
PS – this note was written entirely by this human who received far more gratification from the writing process than I would had I chosen to have ChatGPT or Jasper or similar draft it (is it better? – well we’ll never know :)).
I got several emails about what I referred to as the “Instacart dynamic pricing kerfuffle.” One MNB reader wrote:
Great analysis and commentary on the Instacart dynamic pricing. While I’m not sure I understand what was happening what has been hammered home is that there is no substitute for walking the aisles and making real-time comparisons on your own.
I would take Uber to/from the store before I would use Instacart if I could not drive.
MNB reader Gregory Gheen wrote:
If this was never brought up would the consumers really care? Do they care now?
All they know is the price of meat, coffee, and a host of other products are much higher than normal n inflation. They get prices rising slightly. And they’re not very happy about tariffs.
I’m not sure I understand your first point.
Of course consumers wouldn’t care if the media did not bring it up. That’s the media’s job – to tell people about stuff they don’t know that they should care about. And then explain why.
Reacting to my conversation with Thom Blischok, one MNB reader wrote:
In considering loyalty vs. personalization, a critical obstacle is that my local grocery store knows what I buy in their store. They don’t, however, know what I don’t buy there…..what I buy elsewhere. I regularly buy cottage cheese and distilled water at my local Shop Rite. The cottage cheese is for protein and the distilled water is for my CPAP machine. They also know my age. Therefore, they should be able to use AI to personalize additional items based on what they know.
And, regarding Wegmans’ compilation of data garnered through biometrics in some of its stores, one MNB reader wrote:
Wow, Wegmans has entered 1984.
Ideally they should communicate to everyone what information they have and those individuals should have the right to have it deleted.
And finally, on another subject, one MNB reader wrote:
Congratulations on adding Empire Marketing Strategies as a new Charter Sponsor to MNB!
Like you, many manufacturers are unaware of EMS and there value in the grocery industry much less there value to Kroger and the vendor partners they represent at Kroger. There differentiation has been there premier retail centric business and relationship model with Kroger, which has been unwavering for 45 years. I credit there founder Danny and his long time partner Len, for this winning culture!
My wish through MNB that new manufacturers take the time to research and see the opportunities that comes with having EMS represent them at Kroger.
My wish, too!
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