4 days ago
A Guide On Scaling Your Digital Commerce Business With AI
Zoe Lu is the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Helium 10.
It's been a rollercoaster year for businesses this year. Any leader who has been affected by tariffs—or at least the potential of tariffs—knows the challenges firsthand. During times of uncertainty, the best thing that you can do is start to explore new growth channels. That's where digital commerce has started to show a lot of promise.
If the foundation of your business model is physical products, then digital commerce is all about getting your audience engaged with product content and interested in getting to the product. With seller-first channels like Amazon Influencer Program, TikTok Creator Program, the Walmart Affiliate Program and others, you can also build a new kind of funnel for your business. If you do have physical products, this kind of funnel can help grow your brand footprint across new channels and drive more engagement around your products that leads to conversions at the checkout page, too.
Digital commerce has two pillars: content and connection. And AI can help you massively accelerate both. Here's a checklist of what you should look for:
Creation & Design & Connection
AI for SEO listing copy. AI helps you understand the most important search trends and keywords faster and, more importantly, allows you to dynamically create the content that fits the tone and voice of your brand. This can eliminate bottlenecks for SEO content by allowing you to quickly generate the landing pages and product pages with the best-performing keywords.
AI for omnichannel ad creative. With AI, you can start to generate images and videos with a few words and a good prompt. This can apply to ad creative, social images, product content and listing images. Look for a partner that provides those tools, so you can quickly scale and iterate your creative in listings.
AI to streamline brand assets. With some AI partners, you can actually add your visual assets—including product images—to the tool and generate different variations of your brand. That includes ad creative and other digital assets, making it easy to brainstorm and test both messaging and design.
AI for marketing collateral. From photos and icons to book covers, pamphlets and slides, AI can generate and optimize the content that helps you showcase your business. Once you've brainstormed your concepts, you can build out digital assets that can be used for email, social, print and other channels faster than ever.
The AI Audit
AI is only as good as your data strategy and data quality. Gartner found that 63% of organizations today aren't sure whether they have the right data management practices in place to scale out AI-powered operations. This leads to a lot of abandoned projects and programs that end up wasting time and resources. The firm also predicts that almost half (40%) of agentic AI programs will be cut by 2027 due to rising costs and unclear business value.
While open source AI programs like Claude and OpenAI have access to almost unlimited public data, the data isn't always coming from the most reliable sources. A business that wants to build a brand, optimize a campaign or streamline ad creative with AI has to first put some guardrails in place.
Here are my recommendations for getting started with AI:
Figure out your AI use cases. First, make sure that you know the top ways that you want to use AI for your business. Look for the challenge first and then the solution, rather than adopting tools just to test them for the sake of testing.
Understand the confidentiality of your data. There's a reason that law firms and enterprises aren't adopting AI overnight: Most of the inputs to most AI tools are going into the public domain. An idea that enters the AI can appear somewhere else with the right prompt. Figure out what data you are comfortable sharing and outline best practices for data governance.
Identify the input and output for your AI model. Make sure you know what data is going into the model (if any) to train it. If you're setting up a template to ensure a consistent tone of voice or look and feel, you'll want to communicate that to the rest of the team. The input that goes into the model is what will ultimately determine the output.
Figure out what you can (and want to) automate. AI isn't just about creating new assets and saving time on optimizations—it's also about execution. AI can help you get better insights and recommendations automatically and streamline your operations from start to finish. Research your options to get a better picture of AI use cases overall.
Iterate, test and validate. Try to test the performance of your AI tool against a manual task to see the difference in time spent, performance and quality of output. This will show you which use cases are going to be easy wins.
Finding The Right Solutions For Digital Commerce
This year, a lot of commerce-focused businesses have been centered around making AI work for digital commerce. Any business owner who has experimented with AI probably knows the range of solutions already out there: from copy and SEO to video, sales and email, social and analytics, research and chatbots, web dev and automation and image generation.
The trick is to narrow down what you're trying to accomplish for your digital commerce business. And, if you're really stuck on how to get started, maybe just go to ChatGPT and ask it yourself!
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