Since the AI boom, there’s been a constant talk of how AI will replace humans. While it's true to some extent that AI is gradually taking over certain jobs, AI can’t do everything. No doubt, AI is great at automating basic and repetitive tasks, but handling nuanced tasks is still out of its league.

In e-commerce, there’s a lot of repetitive tasks that AI can handle. Tasks such as order processing, stock counting, and inventory management, are perfect for a non-tiring entity like AI. But then, other sensitive tasks like customer support, marketing, and even content creation still need the human touch. Ultimately, striking a balance between AI automation and human supervision is the real deal for thriving in e-commerce.

What are AI Automations in E-Commerce

AI automations in e-commerce are AI programs and tools which are designed to handle routine tasks. Given that the tasks follow a defined pattern, AI programs are trained to execute the tasks by strictly following the pattern. As such, you’d find AI automations handling tasks like basic customer support enquiries, frequently asked questions (FAQs), forms filling, product repricing, and stock counting etc.

Due to their training, AI automations cannot “think outside the box”. Since they’re usually programmed on a static set of commands and alternatives, their responses are heavily limited. For instance, an AI chatbot on an e-commerce platform has pre-installed responses for preinstalled queries. Once a customer exhausts all the queries and responses without resolving an issue, it’s then time to reroute to a human customer support.

Things AI Automations Can Help With

AI tools are designed for routine tasks, and there’s a lot they can help with when running an online store. Here are a few categories they can help with:

Customer Interactions and Support:

No matter how great you are at multitasking, handling multiple customer enquiries is a really humbling experience. As such, you need to have extra hands that can’t get tired of responding to questions and providing customer support. This is why there are AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. With their pre-programmed questions and answers, they can resolve almost all potential queries from customers. From handling FAQs to offering product recommendations and tracking orders, these AI agents are perfect for routine customer support. They’ll save you time and energy.

Marketing and Sales:

AI algorithms are pretty good at recommending products to customers. They do this by analyzing browsing history, types of purchase, searches, and other shopping preferences. With this, they can recommend products that might be relevant e.g. buying a fishing rod would get you a fishing line recommendation. Imagine all this is tied to marketing! Instead of simply running generic ads, AI could do the necessary market research, assess consumer preferences and target the right audience. When this is done, you’re more likely to enjoy higher conversion rates.

What’s more is that AI could help with product pricing after analyzing the market. Imagine an automated price adjustment that’s based on market demand, competitor prices, and customer behavior. Prices could increase during peak demand, and automatically decrease for clearance sales. You’d be maximizing profit and competition this way.

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AI-assisted Operations and Logistics:

Thanks to the analytical ability of AI tools, they’re adept at analyzing market trends, counting stocks, and automating any mathematical or routine process. As such, they’re great for managing inventory and processing orders. In terms of logistics, AI tools are great for tracking the location of a package.  

Things AI Automations Cannot and Should Not Help With

There’s no denying that AI is great at many things. Their ability to automate repetitive tasks is really useful for freeing up time to resolve other things. What’s more is that there’s less room for errors once the parameters for work are accurate and clearly spelt out for AI. But, despite the amazing benefits of efficiency, scalability, and cost reduction, AI can’t and shouldn’t do everything. Here are a few things AI cannot help with:

Complex Customer Interactions:

As great as AI is in handling customer enquiries, not all queries can be resolved by an AI-generated response. In fact, most customers often prefer rerouting their complaints to human customer support agents rather than go through robotic answers. While AI can help resolve basic issues, they’re not cut out to handle complex issues or appeal to emotions. When customers are deeply upset about an issue, having to put up with an AI only makes it worse. The inability of AI to assess or understand human emotions makes them unfit to handle issues colored by emotions. It takes a human who can listen and smartly leave the script to handle these kinds of situations.

Making Creative and Strategic Business Decisions:

AI may be great at analyzing the market, but one thing it can’t really handle is “the unknown”. AI works with mathematical precision, but the market rarely ever flows like that. Since the market is made up of humans who can easily choose not to act in a certain way, it’s hard to perfectly assess the market. As such, it takes a human to observe and creatively handle such unexpected shifts in the market. Issues such as culture, breaking news, trends, and even gut feeling are factors that only the human mind can adequately cover.

Vision and High-stakes Problem Solving:

Issues that involve abstract and strategic thinking such as vision, identifying new market opportunities, and guiding the pace of a business are matters beyond AI. While AI can provide data to make informed decisions, it cannot replace the creative and strategic insight of the human mind. AI’s inability to factor in abstract concepts such as fairness, empathy, individual experiences, and gut feeling is a risk when trying to solve sensitive business issues. What’s more is that AI relies heavily on the data it’s trained on. If there’s a bias or error in the data, AI is not flexible enough to notice or even change.  

Conclusion

Ultimately, AI automation in e-commerce is great but it can never take the place of humans. It’s at best a tool to improve human functions, not replace them entirely. It’s better to view it as a partnership than a competition.

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