Hey everyone! 👋
I made something for you all! It’s called AI Ready. It’s a web app to help your products get discovered in AI-based search (Things like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI search, Walmart Sparky, Amazon Rufus etc).
Some weeks ago I sent out this post explaining a major shift coming to retail. I called it contextual shopping. You could also call it AI-based shopping. In that post I outlined a few things I thought every brand should consider to be ready for this shift. In brief they were:
Understand your jobs-to-be-done
Improve your product’s performance within that job-to-be-done
Craft product descriptions that were rich in this job-to-be-done information so that AI search can find your product and bring it into the consumer’s orbit
Get the product descriptions onto your site and your retailers’
Because I know all of this is easier said than done I decided to build something to make it easy. At least #1, #3 and #4.
This is how the app works:
Answer some simple questions about your product to understand your job-to-be-done
Get back a context-heavy, outcome-focused product description to help surface your product in AI-based, contextual search.
Edit the description as needed to meet retailer criteria and paste it wherever you want to (I’ve built in some rules to help follow retailer criteria but It may not be perfect).
It’s free so go give it a try here: aiready.shelfconscious.co
If you have any feedback or changes you would like to see just hit reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn!
That’s the short of it but if you are curious to know why I built this and the theory driving it you can read on.
Why I made AI Ready
One late night at about 1 AM some friends and I were sitting on my friend’s back porch just hanging out when all of a sudden the entire sky lit up like it was daytime. We looked up to see the most incredible meteorite streak across the sky and crash into the horizon. To this day I can see it so clearly.
Unfortunately, seeing that meteorite didn’t give us super powers but we did talk about it for months. Randomly someone would say, “Hey remember that time the sun dropped out of the sky?”
I don’t know what the chances were of us being outside on that late night with a perfectly unobstructed view of the sky, but I assume they were low. A few things had to align for that event to occur.
I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff where you are in just the right place before a big thing happens.
I think you and I are in a moment like this. I assume if you're reading this that you work in CPG or retail. I also think that the industry is about to undergo a very big shift. Not just a small change, something structural.
New Lines
Ever since I entered retail many years ago I saw something that was a bit off. The retail industry and shopping was divided based on these arbitrarily-chosen categories (yogurt, snacks, cleaning supplies etc) that sometimes align with consumer behavior but often do not.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that people buy things to fulfill a purpose in their lives. They have a “job-to-be-done” and they want to hire a product to do it. The products that can fulfill this purpose/job-to-be-done might be only in one category, or they might be found in many.
For example, I might need something to eat on the train ride home from work. Something to hold me over before dinner. Preferably, something healthy. This could be achieved with a granola bar or yogurt. In this case, these two things serve the same purpose and yet are not in the same retail category. They aren’t found in the same part of the store or the same part of a retailer’s website. They are not considered competing products to the retailer or to the syndicate data provider. There is no “healthy snacks for train rides home” section in any grocer’s store or website. And yet, as the shopper I would buy these for the same purpose and compare their ability to achieve it when deciding what to buy.
For the people who have organized retail these products have no relationship. But for the consumer, they have a very close relationship. This demonstrates the mismatch between how shopping has been set up and how consumer behavior often plays out.
I should say that things are set up this way for a perfectly logical reason. In the past, before the Internet, we needed ways to organize a store. It helps people find things. Then, with the Internet, we needed the same thing. Products needed to be organized in some sort of manner so that consumers could find what they needed on the website. That's how we got ecommerce categories.
When search came along, it only worked by using keywords. So again, products are grouped by their attributes. It makes sense that we drew these lines. Order had to be instituted.
We took this entity called supply (aka everything we could sell) and we divided it into clean, attribute-based categories out of necessity.
But now, the lines are disappearing and new lines are being drawn. New lines are being drawn because the things that forced us to draw the lines in the first place (physical shelves, graphical user interfaces, keyword search) are no longer the only way to find the thing we need and fulfill our job-to-be-done.
Contextual shopping with AI
Over history new inventions have created and re-created entire systems. Airplanes re-organized the system of travel. Computers re-organized the system of work. Drones changed warfare. Now, the system of retail is being re-organized because of AI.
AI is a new way of interacting with the computer. Which means it opens up new ways of shopping. Specifically, it allows you or me to tell the computer our job-to-be-done and let it handle the rest. We can provide the context of our situation and our desired outcome and let the computer go out and find all the possible products that could fulfill our purposes.
No walking around a store.
No browsing categories of a website.
No inefficient keyword search.
I simply just tell the AI what’s going on and what I want, and it tells me what options I have.
We are moving from category-based shopping to context-based shopping.
Instead of clean, attribute-based category lines, we get something that more closely resembles actual reality and actual consumer behavior. It's messy and organic and it's based on contexts, desired outcomes and jobs-to-be-done.
Where does this lead us?
You may already see where this is going. If consumers are unencumbered by categories and they begin to shop this way (which I believe they will) then it means a few things for every CPG brand big and small.
Know your job-to-be-done
As the lines are re-drawn, where does your product land? What jobs do people hire your product to do for them? This is important because your yogurt is no longer going to compete against other yogurts. It's going to compete within a consumer context and it needs to prove it is the best product in that context to achieve the consumer’s outcome(s).
Cater the product to the job
You need to make sure your product is the best tool for a given context. As the game changes so will your competitors and this may mean that you need to reevaluate your value proposition. You may also want to make changes to your product to double down on certain consumer contexts. This takes a product-first mindset which I first spoke about here.
Get discovered in AI-based search
Once you know the consumer context(s) that you are going after and you've got your product in a good place to perform well in that context, you then need to make sure you get that info into the product data of your website and each retailer so that the AI knows to pull your product into the consumers orbit in a given context.
That brings us to AI Ready
So that’s why I built AI Ready. To make this process easier and position us all so that we can watch this meteorite pass by.
Go give it a try! aiready.shelfconscious.co
Any feedback or changes you would like to see just hit reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn or Substack!
Take care,
Jordon ✌️