Experimentation with artificial intelligence technologies is exploding. In marketing and sales alone, people are using AI to write blog articles, social media posts and create custom profile pictures that often look better than the original source material.
Visual AI will change eCommerce photography - how images and video are created for eCommerce stores, social media marketing and all types of visual sales and marketing. Simply put, “Visual artificial intelligence is a computer science discipline that trains machines to make sense of images and visual data the same way people do.” Those who learn how to harness and apply visual AI, will change how visuals are created, recognized, searched for, ratified as authentic or fraudulent and so much more.
Here are 3 ways Visual AI will improve eCommerce:
Need your products composited seamlessly into a hundred different backgrounds for all those promotional moments throughout the year? Now you can start with a single image or video of your product and through careful manipulation of artificial intelligence version that image for holiday promotions, thematic posts, unique collections and more.
At KittyKat we call this our multiplier effect. We shoot once and then continuously generate new images using a unique set of instructions for AI engines like Midjourney. Here’s a product shot we created using a source image of the actual product embedded in a beautiful and believable way in a watery scene.
Backgrounds, imagined props and wacky ideas too difficult or costly to produce in real life can be created by the right manipulation of artificial intelligence. It is revolutionary and exciting when used as a toolbox by the right professionals who can make it look as real and as eye-catching as if reality.
After a shoot, there is often a lot of work to be done. Choosing selects, color correcting images, cleaning up backgrounds, even sharpening blurry shots all take time. AI Image Editing can make these processes more time-efficient for the editor and cost-effective for the marketer after the asset.
There are numerous AI software packages out there to harness already and many more in the works.
For example, Narrative Select can read images using AI and detect unusable assets dramatically reducing the selection and time spent looking through images and detecting copies or discards, Sharpen AI can fix blurry images, recreating details otherwise lost. These editing and processing stages can take hours, with AI it can be almost instant.
An incredible new tool called Imagine works in tandem with Adobe Lightroom and with its machine learning, can imitate your editing style and do these edits for you. And there is plenty more to come.
Artificial intelligence will change how we all search for products. Instead of typing keywords iteratively in Google or Bing until you finally arrive at the right black leather backpack, you know, the one with the trolley sleeve, that can hold the latest Mac Air and has the straps just so, You will query Chat GPT, Google Lens or another AI bot and instantly find what you are looking for. Amanda Milberg, Data Scientist at Dataiku described, “Given the new generation of customers, this type of search is powerful for seamless product discovery. Today’s consumers shop with their mobile devices and are influenced to purchase through video reels on social media.”
Visual AI makes it easier to recommend related products, like this example from by “reading” and understanding the visual characteristics of a product and comparing them to other visually-related products. Adnan Masood, Chief Architect, AI & Machine Learning at UST summed this up, “Machine vision also plays a role in recommendations and product image search; search engines use machine vision algorithms to analyse and understand the contents of the image so they can provide best suitable and pertinent results.”
Visual AI will not magically replace the effort of human beings, though. The next, great technical capability will be how experts query artificial intelligence engines to get a beautiful and fit-for-purpose result.
