Generative AI, with its capability to create new content across text, audio and video, will revolutionize how we approach the creation and consumption of information. While it’s still in its early days, the introduction of AI and the excitement surrounding it feels like one of those pivotal moments in technology that has the potential to change everything, empowering a new generation of creators to do more, faster and easier than ever before.
commercetools was built around a similarly powerful idea that best-of-breed, API-first solutions have the ability to outperform legacy technology monoliths. Our offering, built on MACH™ technologies, consists of a robust set of open APIs that allow our customers to quickly integrate new technologies in a flexible, highly scalable manner.
Brands embracing this new approach, now widely known as composable commerce, are no longer at the mercy of monolithic providers that limit their ability to innovate. They don’t have to wait for new capabilities to be delivered or take the risk of trying to add a feature that may or may not be compatible with their platform. With a modern solution such as commercetools Composable Commerce for B2C, they have the freedom to easily turn ideas into reality — whether it's by building their own new features or taking advantage of plug-and-play APIs. This means they can experiment with new technology, such as generative AI, and embrace new trends without risk to daily operations.
So, since everyone’s been talking about AI recently, we started thinking, what if you put these two ideas together? Where could generative AI be used in digital commerce to improve the customer experience and accelerate business innovation? And equally important — how quickly and easily could we deliver these innovations using commercetools’ APIs?
On a Friday afternoon in February, we asked one of our Customer Success Engineers to take on the challenge, suggesting he look specifically at opportunities to leverage the power of APIs with the capabilities of AI to enrich our customers’ product catalogs. A little over an hour later (and after an almost-disappointingly straightforward exercise), we had a fully integrated, functioning product description generator able to quickly create high-quality, compelling product descriptions and publish them directly to commercetools Composable Commerce.
Here’s how our product description generator works:
Find our example integration code here:
/commercetools/commercetools-magic
Our engineer knew that brands have to consistently churn out new product descriptions as they refresh and expand their product mix and delivered a viable solution to make the task faster and easier. As you can see in the video, all you need to do to generate a product description is enter a few keywords and suggest a tone for the content.
But honestly, what’s really cool about our product description generator is that adding it required no enhancement to commercetools’ product offering. No roadmapping, no launch plans, no delay. Our open architecture and APIs made it almost trivially easy to enrich product data with generative AI using out-of-the-box capabilities that have been part of commercetools since day one. It literally took more time to write and edit this blog post than it did to write the code!
The ease with which we turned an idea into a tangible, useful innovation is incredibly relevant in the fast-moving world we live in today. No one has a crystal ball that predicts what the future will bring — all we know is that change is constant and brands have to be ready to adapt at all times. Today, it’s generative AI. Tomorrow, it will be something completely different. The beauty of building a product on MACH principles is that no matter what comes next, you’ll be ready. All you need are APIs, an active imagination and maybe a few free minutes on a Friday afternoon.
To learn more about how commercetools solutions are enabling innovation for Ulta Beauty and Belk, read the recap of our NRF panel discussion, ”Churning Innovation: How to know when a big move is the right move.”
