🗞️ On-Device Intelligence is here 💥💪

Welcome to the 11th edition of the AI for E-Commerce newsletter, your trusted resource for actionable AI strategies in eCommerce, especially on Amazon! We’ve hit 1300 subscribers (up a 100 from last week)💥🔥!

So, each issue has 4 sections:

1. Practical AI Use Cases

2. Cool tools that you can start using today to improve your eCommerce business

3. Nerd Bytes for all you nerds out there

4. Voices from AI Thought Leaders in the E-Commerce space

Our focus is on tangible benefits. No technical jargon, no pie-in-the-sky concepts—just straightforward, actionable advice to help you stay competitive and grow your online business. 

Let’s go!

In last week’s AI Practical Use Cases section we had predicted that in the future RUFUS will start showing sponsored ads. Well guys, the future is HERE (wow, that happened so fast!) Amazon announced last week that we can expect to see Sponsored Ads in RUFUS related placements. (Thanks Alexander Swade for spotting!)

For this week’s section we are talking about a cool Canva AI tool called Magic Media.

This tool allows you to convert any prompt into stunning visuals that you can use in your Product Listings. Here’s one I created for a garden planter with spring flowers.

I liked the one in the bottom left and used another Canva AI tool called Magic Grab to detach foreground from background.

Next, I took this image of a planter on Amazon on the left and seamlessly wove it into the image above to create a stunning lifestyle image, ready to use in a listing with just a few clicks. I used the idea of “layering”, a technique that everyone should learn.

The idea of layering traces back to good old Photoshop, but is super simple. We all know that AI is still not the best at taking a product photo and faithfully placing it in stunning backdrops without causing some amount of distortion. We don’t like distortion, nah. So we the circumvent the flaws of AI by leveraging what it can do best by getting it to manufacture the parts and do the assembly ourselves.

Conceptualize the elements of the composition and simply put them together. AI will take you 90% of the way, the rest is up to your imagination.

For the Cool Tools section today, we are talking about accessing one of the BEST prompts repositories on the planet! This is not so well known, but OpenAI has their own Discord channel that the best minds are contributing to. You can get access for free but you will need this link to join, AND you will need to authenticate with your OpenAI login.

Once you are in, you can access prompt-labs, prompt engineering directories, ChatGPT4, MidJourney, AI for DataAnalytics and so much more…

Here’s an example of a structured Q&A style prompt I came across. There are tons more that you can access on Discord, once you have logged in.

In this week's Nerd Bytes section, I want to share the shiny new announcement from Apple’s event yesterday! The new iPhone 16 with the A18 chip will ship on October 20th with built in AI intelligence.

This latest Apple Intelligence announcement is a major leap in Apple's integration of AI into its ecosystem. Essentially, it brings advanced generative AI capabilities, designed to make devices like iPhones, iPads, and Macs more intelligent, personalized, and context-aware.

Google has their own equivalent with Google Tensor and Samsung has their Qualcomm Snapdragon chips to achieve similar on-device intelligence.

While these are still far from being perfect, we are now one step further in carrying advanced intelligence in our pockets. As Ray Kurzweil says: The Singularity is Nearer!

For the Thought leader section this week we asked our friend Leo Sgovio from Convomat about the future of AI in E-Commerce and this is what he had to say:

"With the introduction of AI and real-time machine learning algorithms, the way we optimize Amazon listings has drastically changed.

To help clarify this, think about what has traditionally been considered the most important on-page element for your Amazon listing, the one every course and guru has emphasized for inserting your main keywords.

The title? You’re right.

Now, visit this search results page: Amazon: Games for Game Night and notice how many products rank for the keyword “games for game night” without having that exact phrase in the title.

This shift has led me to develop a new optimization approach called semantic search and generative search optimization.

This technique aligns with the underlying models behind RUFUS and COSMO as well.

In this example, the buyer’s intent is to find a group-friendly game. Instead of just matching keywords, AI now considers popular and recommended games by evaluating key features of a good game night (e.g., group size, engagement level, type of game). The phrase "for game night" introduces situational context (a social setting), which enhances the search by guiding the results toward social, engaging, or group-oriented games.

So, as expert sellers, we must now optimize our products not only with keywords but also by focusing on attributes that help the algorithm understand why our game is a good fit for a group setting.

This might sound challenging, but by integrating these attributes across your listings—using images, videos, text, Q&A, premium content, and more — you can help the algorithm better understand your product’s audience and, most importantly, whether it fits their search intent.

If you get this right, you’ll improve your organic placements in both traditional searches and conversational queries on platforms like RUFUS, which focus on understanding the full context of a user’s query rather than just matching keywords.”