How AI Is Changing Shopping: Product Recommendations

Shopping used to be about finding what you wanted at a price that suited your budget. But with AI-powered product recommendations, the process has become much simpler and more enjoyable!

In this episode we chat with Oliver Edholm who tells us how this technology is changing both consumers' shopping experiences as well as businesses'.

ABOUT OLIVER

Oliver Edholm is the Co-founder and CEO of Depict.ai. 

At 15, Oliver dropped out of high school. At 16, he moved across the world and hustled his way into an ML research position at the National University of Singapore. At 17, he founded Depict and joined Y Combinator to revolutionise the way we discover products online. Now at 19, Oliver leads a team of 35 employees at one of the most cutting-edge Ecommerce startups in Europe.

Here’s a summary of the great stuff that we cover in this show:

• If you want to get started out with AI, your traffic and the number of SKUs that you have must be at a reasonable level before AI makes sense for you. Several 100 SKUs and probably a couple of 1000 people at least visiting your website. The more the data, the better the AI tends to be the rule of thumb.
• Depict can work with more sparse data sets, which have less data. Product information is incredibly useful when recommending a product like going to a physical retail store and asking the salesperson for advice. Almost all existing recommender systems ignore that. Depict can apply incredibly smart image recognition algorithms, understanding subtle patterns, which was impossible a few years ago, but is now possible. When combined with the user data, it can generate really good results.
• There are a lot of buzzwords around AI and many people exploit that fact. The way to avoid gimmicks then is to become really good at asking yourself, what problems do I need to solve and does the solution actually solve this problem? And then don't care if it uses AI or not. Simple solutions tend to work surprisingly well, a lot of times.

Enjoying listening to our conversation about AI product recommendations :-)

For complete show notes, transcript and links to our guest, check out our website: www.ecommerce-podcast.com.