A Huge Impact On Payments

Along comes Amazon and the rollout of online retail. Convenient though it was to not have to leave home, something was missing: the ability to summon a sales assistant to inform and buttress your decision making and cheerfully ring up your purchases. Try as retailers might on their online platforms, with rudimentary text-to-speech features and unrefined personalization attempts, they couldn’t duplicate that reassuring experience of a compassionate live human hovering patiently. 

With the AI revolution and deep learning, that’s all out the window. Now we’ve got the promise of “conversational commerce”, buoyed by “conversational AI”, poised to provide shopping-excursion joy for consumers (and business buyers) that can virtually rival those of being in a physical retail environment.

Who knows, maybe yakking in your jammies with a nice knowledgeable bot could be even better than the real thing, or at least a viable alternative? Time will tell, but as is true in a physical store, online shoppers are more open to exploring and buying when “someone” representing the company is there to chat about their buying needs or whatever else is on their consumer minds. 

What is conversational commerce?

Among other definitions, conversational commerce is a promising form of leveraging user intent and applying personalization. It’s the art of providing engaging online user experiences, namely, humanlike, helpful conversational experiences, which are made infinitely possible by recent advances in AI and machine learning. Conversational commerce encompasses all the customer-journey touchpoints where a chat or messaging session could have an impact on the shopper’s choosing to buy an item.

“Conversational commerce is about delivering convenience, personalization, and decision support while people are on the go, with only partial attention to spare,” explained Chris Messina when he coined the term in 2015. In its modern incarnation, Laura Hennigan adds in Forbes, it’s about “the place where e-commerce and technology intersect, allowing brands to connect with their customers in new ways, 24/7.”