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“Leaving the industry better than I found it”-Dave Foy
Each week, Dave sits with a panel of guests to discuss the topic of the week. From Coaching for Success to Sales vs. Service, Dave talks to the industry and professional leaders that can bring their insight and knowledge to the viewers.
Our W.E. A.R.E Feature airs on the third Thursday of the month and spotlights Women in Fixed Ops and how they are changing the industry and leading the charge to a better customer experience.
Sharon Guy helps organizations understand how to adopt AI into their workflows to increase productivity and efficiency. Sharon is an international keynote speaker on AI and innovation. She's the former head of global key accounts at Alibaba and general manager at a billion dollar ecommerce unicorn. In her tenure, she has advised brands and heads of state in crafting a digital strategy with programmatic marketing and AI. She's been the keynote speaker at TEDx, Singularity University, UBS, Nestle, Deloitte, and many other organizations.
Speaker 1:She is the author of the book, ecommerce reimagined. Sharon is also a global shaper in the World Economic Forum. Sharon has an honors bachelor's degree in international development from McGill and a master's in information management from Columbia University. Her methodology called culture fluid has won audiences of various ages and backgrounds. Today, we have Sharon Guy, and I wanna welcome you, Sharon, to the fixed ops mastermind.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, Dave. Great to chat with you in the beginning about car parts and ecommerce and things. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:We had a great conversation that, unfortunately, you audience did not get to participate in because I was not recording it, but we will, we we will cover a bunch of that as as we move on through today. If you could take couple of minutes and and just introduce people to to who you are, and then we'll get straight into the wisdom.
Speaker 2:Sure. So, I'm an AI author and expert. I am a I'm a keynote speaker mostly right now where I go to a lot of different conferences, and I tell people about the advantages of using AI in their business.
Speaker 1:Excellent. And so, our show, we do in in three segments. The three segments are, AI and the future of retail, ecommerce innovation, and retail strategy. And so we'll start at that segment one, AI and the future of retail. And if if you could share with us first, you you talk about culture fluid.
Speaker 1:If if you could talk about what that means and how it fits into today's world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So culture fluid is a concept that I developed when I was working at Alibaba for about, now maybe four years ago. But the idea is to be very nimble and adaptable. So Alibaba was a company that was very nimble from its start. At first, it was when it grew from nothing, eBay was the largest player at the time in 1999, and that was the dominant sort of platform where people went to buy everything and anything.
Speaker 2:And Alibaba saw an opportunity where they really catapulted really quickly and grew in size to now they're almost the same. But depending on what type of GMV marker you are measuring, but sometimes they're they're doing larger sales and what Amazon is doing, and that's that's really hard to fathom. But it if you think about where all of our products come from, and so there are hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers. You might have heard of the term Amazon FBA before. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They all have to purchase their products from somewhere, and alibaba.com is most likely the place that they'll start to purchase that product, bring that into The US, bring that into The UK, wherever Amazon is selling, and mark up that product. And so because although, you know, different administrations is trying to change where things are made and manufactured, come January, at the moment, most things, most products are still made in China, in Chinese factories. And so what a lot of these Amazon sellers are doing is purchasing from these factories directly and then marking them up, adjusting the products. A lot of the car part we have a lot of auto people from the automotive industry listening. A lot of car parts are also produced in China as well.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Car accessories, small little SKUs. And that's why you've seen sort of the rise in platforms like TEMU, if you've heard of that, t m u, Xian. And they were they're all companies that's trying to that's riding the wave of Chinese manufactured goods. And so retail has really changed because of it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think in in the last month, I pay attention to a lot of the retail conglomerates that are shutting down. So Party City just declared bankruptcy and closed. A lot of dollar stores are in decline, and a lot of that is because of these type of platforms like the Timus, like the Sheeons, like the alibaba.coms, where we are just much more comfortable in purchasing online. This year was the first year for Black Friday where normally on the day of Black Friday, you'd see a huge rise in foot traffic in a lot of these malls around The US. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This was the first year where if you went to a mall during Black Friday, depending on the city that you were in, some of them were pretty deserted or it was just not as not as high as expectations. Right. A lot of the reason for that is people have really gotten comfortable shopping online on ecommerce. So on the flip side of that and from the ecommerce growth rates for this Black Friday was monumental. It was it was it was record numbers.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And I think that change will only continue, and AI accelerates a lot of that when when we look at the retail industry as a whole.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so how how will AI transform that retail landscape be beyond beyond basic automation, which which I think is what a a lot of people look at right now?
Speaker 2:So a lot of retail brands are trying to personalize, cater towards that customer. I've worked with, companies where they do a lot of what they call client profiling. So you see that in, a bit more upscale stores, maybe a Michael Kors and above, type of brand, where you walk into the store and they know exactly who you are just from seeing you as an old previous customer or if you, signed in to a store signage and gave them your name, your previous order history pops up on these sales associates, devices. Now you'll see a lot of I just recently went to, Jill Sander, which is a pretty premium fashion brand. Every single sales associate there had a little iPhone with an app that they would, they would sort of look at.
Speaker 2:And when they knew my name, they instantly searched it and saw all of my previous order history so that they know what other pieces to recommend you because they know that you have already bought Mhmm. This particular blazer in a certain color. And now they're the the matching pant set is now in your size, and they're they'll recommend that to you in store. So you'll see we'll probably see a lot more of that coming in in that retail space because these retail brands don't want to lose these physical stores. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That a lot of these and it doesn't get it's also very dependent on the customer where when you see an older customer, they like to go in store. They like to shake hands. They like to see that sales associate that they've met with for for tons of years and just say, hey. What's up? What how's Yep.
Speaker 2:How was how was Christmas? And so offline locations, when we when we talk about brands, is still a pretty precious place of point of sale. Mhmm. Even though online is growing a lot, you still wanna create that magical customer experience when someone is stepping foot in your physical store.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and that's something that dealerships can can learn from. And and, typically, dealerships are slow to to adopt things. They they wait to see if it's successful somewhere else, but before they start to adopt it. But that ability to really know your customer, when when they when they come in the store.
Speaker 1:And you almost have an advantage at the dealership. Right? Because they're coming in with a with a real identifying piece, which is their car. Right? So if you can identify that car, you can identify the person within it and then, you know, understand what their their history is, when when they like to make appointments, what time of day they they wanna be in there, whether they need a ride every time they come in or, you know, all of those types of things where you you could really use that to to make better personal connections with with the customers.
Speaker 1:And there's there's some powerful powerful tools that that, will will start emerging in automotive soon.
Speaker 2:When I worked at Alibaba, I worked inside this business unit called Tmall, which is similar to an Amazon of The US. And we would have a ton of car brands, whether it was Ford, Toyota, Tesla, opening up a Tmall store. So opening up online stores within that ecommerce marketplace. So imagine it I mean, I don't know if this exists on Amazon where Tesla opens their own branded store on Amazon. Maybe it already exists.
Speaker 1:Or it's I don't I don't think that exists, but but Hyundai Hyundai and Amazon just have a have a partnership to for people to supposedly purchase a Hyundai through Amazon. I don't know if you can actually complete an entire purchase there, but you can start it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's, think, the whole goal of why these, these car brands saw Tmall as such a great place to open a store. It's it's all that traffic, all that online, all those online eyeballs that are already there shopping for makeup and grocery items that they also have car needs too. So they didn't while they didn't, you know, sell the complete car online, they did drive a lot of in store traffic. So whenever there was, like, a new model that would come out, they would put the put them in these beautiful posters, have these celebrities to just be part of that, and that's where you get a lot of those clicks.
Speaker 2:And then the UX, the the the buttons would be designed really well so that you are clicking, oh, would you be interested in this? Would you be interested in test driving this? Well, we're located at this location, and this is the time where you can come in and try it out. And so a lot of people discovered those new models via those online stores because dealerships, it's it's they're located in one location. And so unless you are literally driving past it because you live in that neighborhood, you're probably gonna miss it.
Speaker 2:You probably don't even know its existence. But the the way that these car brands worked out this this online back end is it made their cars available to this big group of online shoppers. So they are still they're I think the the cars category grew exponentially because of this new way of attracting people. So it's it's interesting to to see that strategy potentially play out in The US too.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. And and there were a lot of people that that there's still a lot of people who are who are watching carefully what happens with this Hyundai and Amazon, collaboration. Because in in in The US, at least, there's there's this, this franchise model for for the the, dealerships where, you know, if you're going to buy a if you're going to buy a new Ford, a new Chevy, whatever it is, you're going to do it through a dealership. Right?
Speaker 1:You you can't you you can't go to an online store and and purchase a new car. It has to go through a a franchise dealership. That Amazon, angle, it gives a different road to the sale, for for our customer and and, you know, whether whether that holds up through franchise laws or or whatever is is yet to be seen. What, what emerging, technologies do you think businesses should be preparing for as far as AI stuff go? I know we I I mentioned to you when we were talking before.
Speaker 1:I saw your your video that that you had posted, about AI agents, and and how that is really coming into being now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So and we were also earlier talking about SEMA, the the SEMA show where Mhmm. I'm gonna be speaking to the women's leaders forum in March in Orlando. I talk a lot about how small businesses can use AI, Whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're you're someone that works in sales or marketing, you should definitely be using AI to your advantage. Generative AI is sort of what's taken the spotlight since November 2022 when ChatGPT came out.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are using it to write everything from emails to briefs to creating PowerPoint decks, to analyzing, survey data of maybe a a product that they've sold online, and now you have thousands of customer reviews. But maybe some of these reviews, people are mentioning for a specific, gap that this product has and you don't have the time to read through those thousands of reviews, you plop it all in something like ChatGubitY, and it gives you a cleaner look at what these people are actually saying about your product. So a lot of ecommerce managers are using that. The agents world is something that we'll see very much accelerate this year. So, when we talk or when I go into these AI keynotes, I talk about how AI is happening in five waves.
Speaker 2:So wave one was predictive analytics where, that was the Target era when there's a story about how Target's, product managers were able to guess which of the which of their customers was already pregnant. These teenage girls were already pregnant before their fathers knew that they were pregnant. So they were sending these coupons for pregnant mothers to these houses, and these father fathers are like, why why are you are you encouraging my daughters to become pregnant? That costs a lot of PR and controversy. But later on, those girls were indeed became pregnant mothers.
Speaker 2:So how did Target know that before the family members even did?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's from a lot of their shopping history. And so that was wave one, and we call that predictive analytics. So a lot of the machine learning algorithms that's running underneath Facebook, running, within Netflix, Instagram, TikTok, it's it's it's a pretty mature technology by now. And so wave two, we've seen that in 02/2023, 2094 with what we call Copilot products. So now if you're using Zoom, for instance, maybe you'll see that AI companion button if you're a paid Zoom user.
Speaker 2:It's able to summarize a lot of those meeting notes. If you are a user of Microsoft three sixty five, you have access to Copilot, which is now in a Word document, you don't have to start from a blank page. If you're about to con if you're about to write something, you can just prompt, Microsoft Word to say, I am about to write this, newsletter update and what's happening in my dealership, this month, or I wanna write a happy New Year's message, to all of my customers, and it's writing that for you. So that that was wave two. So wave three is what we call agents, and that's where we have a lot these AI tools becoming sort of semi autonomous workers, that can be productive and add to the productivity of your team.
Speaker 2:So Salesforce, when they did their big conference last year, their CEO came on and showed a demo of Agentforce, where they, have a Slack chat. And there are a lot of human workers in that Slack chat talking about, ordering something. And then you have a lot of agents also in that Slack chat working right alongside the human workers to process the order, to then give tracking, to then calculate inventory.
Speaker 1:A lot
Speaker 2:of the more manual work is then handed over to those agents and maybe what SKUs to buy or in what quantity device. So some of the more strategic decisions is still taken on by the human, but all of the order processing and, everything else that happens post sale, that's that's taken on by agents. So that's one use case, and we're gonna see a lot of other use cases of agents in sales and marketing. It's it's very contextual of of what your problem is. But in a lot of the keynotes that I do, I share a lot of those Asian examples.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that's that's it's exciting to, to to think about those things. And you think about the amount of times when you're communicating back and forth within the company and somebody asked for something, you asked for something, right, and and it gets missed. But the the AI agents aren't gonna miss those things. Right?
Speaker 1:They're they're that they're gonna make sure that that those are caught and and acted on or followed up followed up on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. And I think what sometimes is frustrating within a team where we're all human workers is sometimes passive aggression could seep in where, you know, you make a request to someone and they're kinda slightly ignoring it because they have other more pressing things going on and you're like, checking in again. Where is the x y z I s? Well, we've all been in those situations.
Speaker 2:But, you know, when you're talking to an agent or a completely something AI, they don't have that other list of pressing things to do. Right. Yeah. Maybe you have to wait for a couple of seconds for them to generate an answer for you. But Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You know, they're a lot less strategic because they don't have that extra nerve to be strategically thinking about things. A lot less political at work when you're working with various teams, and sometimes you're stepping on somebody else's toes or vice versa, and that gets sensitive. We don't have that problem with agents.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So, I say that sometimes, you know, it's good to have a couple of agents working alongside you. It it serves as a glue almost or a lubricant Mhmm. Within a team.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The that's I mean, sometimes feelings get in the way of things. Right? So sometimes it's great to have that, and and you have to you you don't have to, but you have those trade offs with with those AI agents and and having things like that involved. Right?
Speaker 1:You have the the trade off of it's not gonna strategically think. It's not necessarily going to prioritize, you you know, to realize that it needs to prioritize something. But on the other hand, it's also not gonna not gonna ignore a task, whether inadvertently or not. It's not gonna ignore a task that needs to be done either. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And so there's a lot of dealerships that have online part stores. We we talked about this before we started recording. And at OEM Interactive, we're driving traffic and improving conversions on on those sites. And so drawing from your your Alibaba experience, what what do you think makes Asian ecommerce markets different and unique? And what do you think The US markets could learn from them?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wrote a whole book about this called ecommerce reimagined. The so I also talk a lot about this in my keynotes. The it's not that Asian ecommerce or ecommerce platforms are there are are so much better because they because of the transfer of knowledge or whatnot was better. It's simply because there is just it's just so much more competitive in that market.
Speaker 2:And so when there's a lot of players, when there's a lot of brands, first of all, there's just a lot more consumers. So if we look at the two largest consumer markets in the world, US, China, US is about 330,000,000 people in population. So that's 330,000,000 people's needs, different needs, needs in food, needs in beauty, needs in clothing, and car parts, and all of that. And then on the other side in China, you have 1,400,000,000 people. So that's about three or four x that time.
Speaker 2:So that's that's that's 1,400,000,000 peoples of needs and preferences and choices and multiply that with all the different categories like food and car partners. So that's where you see the difference. So the number of competitors are just so much it's it's higher there. And that's why they have to get a lot more innovative. They have to find more hacks, more tricks, more ways to attract eyeballs.
Speaker 2:You have to get more creative. Maybe you're, maybe it's something visual so they have it has to be more visually appealing. Because if they don't do that, they just don't have that customer and they die out as a business. So they're forced to innovate. When you have something like an ecommerce platform where an ecommerce platform is the thing that consolidates all the competitors together, you're now all competing in one domain.
Speaker 2:You really now have to your your competitors is one button click away from this current product that you're selling. And so the the the things are just very different from a from from a design perspective, from a ease of use perspective, and sometimes what you're also delivering as well, you have to be competitive in all fronts.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And how how do you think traditional retailers can, pivot successfully when using AI to augment workloads?
Speaker 2:Pivot so so what I say for a lot of knowledge workers is looking at that, what is AI good at and what am I good at framework. So I I always have a a lot of people do this exercise where you look at your own role, and your one role is you can you can divide out into multiple different tasks. And maybe you're gonna be cutting up your one roll into 50 or a 100 different tasks. It's important to do this exercise where you pull out certain tasks that you're doing where you know you're doing every single day, or it's very, very repetitive, or it's very, very manual. It's very calculative, perhaps.
Speaker 2:And those are the tasks that most likely AI will take on in the future. Then there are some tasks where, you know, there are certain fires you have to put out or there are certain new projects you have to react to. There are certain customers that, you're now talking to. And sometimes when we come into these larger meetings, we always want someone senior more senior on the team to tag along to somebody a bit more junior. There's a reason for that.
Speaker 2:It's because that more senior person knows and it has that, has that, context in how to deal and treat certain business partners, how to negotiate in certain rooms. So that's the part that most likely will stay human. And when you have found those tools or tasks that you can start to automate, proactively go out and and find some of those tools. There's, since the release of Charge GPT, there's over 10,000 tools that's been released. Everything from productivity, writing, marketing, sales, design, and new things are being developed every single day in this space.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And so most likely, if you're thinking of a very specific thing that you wanna that you want AI to take over with your work, probably it's already been developed. You just don't know about it. But the the, like, the key there is just to hunt down and and look for it. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can, so I go through a lot of those tools on a regular basis in my newsletter, and in my website. So I make sure that I'm providing some of those very usable tools to my audience, on a month to month basis. But there's also a lot that I don't know, because just because it's being developed at a very fast pace.
Speaker 1:It's such it's such a speed. I've learned so much in in the the few months of of reading your newsletter and some of the things that that, the the tools that you've put in there, I I would have never even thought would exist. Okay. And yet and yet they're out there and and working. Sharon, what do what do you what do you see as some some common mistakes that people make as they as they try to get into the a AI transformation of their business?
Speaker 2:I think they I think it's a so prompting, I think, is really a pretty tough skill to master. I think we're often giving up when we give them a three, four, five word question, and the answer that we get is just very subpar. And you're and then you would say, oh, I could have written a better thing than that. And and I probably usually do and you probably usually can. And thank god that you can because that's how you know.
Speaker 2:You you can hold on to your job as a as a human worker. Right. But I think it's, you know, it's it's it's whatever you put in is whatever you get out. So if you're putting into a AI system pretty cursory terms or kind of very, very general. What you get out will also be very general.
Speaker 2:So the biggest mistake is I think people are not that specific with the things that they're asking. Sometimes they're not asking follow-up questions either and digging deeper, but I think that's also a muscle. It's it's we often have taken a lot of things for granted where we kind of just see an answer, nod to the answer, and say, okay. Yep. Moving on.
Speaker 2:It's sort of a natural way for us humans to navigate the world. We're we're not we're not gonna be deeply digging into every single minor detail, you know, how can our lives move on? So it's a balance, but it's also a yeah. I would say it's it's sort of like a muscle that we we don't really know how to how to work on just yet. And that's something that when we're using these AI tools for the first time, we're going to sort of write it off as it doesn't work that well.
Speaker 2:So I'm just gonna move on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I feel like my my prompts have now become blog posts. It's it's
Speaker 2:it's Sometimes they have to be. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And like you said, like like, when I first started using it, like, you just play around with it, and then you you read some stuff that says you've gotta, you know, give it that direction of, you know, acting as a or you are as a. Right? And then so you add that sentence in there, but then there's other things to keep adding in there and and other things and other things. And it it it feels like at at times, you prompted to do something, and and you've literally written 500 words to to prompt it to do something.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true. So it's it's it's important to gauge too.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's pretty contextual as to what tasks you wanna spend that 500 word time on and which ones you, yeah, would rather maybe go to a search engine.
Speaker 1:Right. So sometimes it's just it's you're better off to do that, right, if you can just find the answer that way. And so that that takes us into segment three, our last segment, which is retail strategy. And so the the the legacy thinking, right, the the we've always done it this way, type of thinking, how do you see that impacting retail, innovation and adoption of AI?
Speaker 2:I'm doing what has always worked. It's just pretty natural for humans and companies to run their businesses. If, you know, I had a certain revenue target, I hit that revenue target. Well, these were the things that I did to hit that target. I'm just gonna do the same thing next year.
Speaker 2:It's pretty natural for all of us to do that. I think when we do that, though, the thing that we're forgetting is what are the opportunities that I missed out on? What are the things I didn't try that maybe I could have done better? Maybe I could have really killed that target and blow it out of the water if I tried something else. And that's something that I think a lot of not just retailers, but all of us.
Speaker 2:It's a reminder, for us to remember to to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how do you how do you think people could could use, like, a chat GPT to to help them with with that thinking? With that thinking of of not just, okay. Yes. I hit my targets this year by doing x, y, and z.
Speaker 1:How could I hit my targets or do better next year doing something completely different?
Speaker 2:By asking the question, what did I miss? So sometimes I'm in some of these threads where I'm prompting, and I'm asking it to complete certain things. And I'm pretty satisfied now by the answer that they've that it's already given me. But by asking that extra question, what did I miss? In my interaction with you, what did I not ask you?
Speaker 2:What did what did I forget to think about? And then looking at that second answer, it really, puts things into perspective of, you know, that this is there's more than meets the eye.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I love that. We we all fall into that that confirmation bias, if you will. Right? Where we we we think we we think we have the answer, but I had I I'm gonna add that into my into my workflow for things of of what did I miss here?
Speaker 1:What am I not seeing? Mhmm. And so final question. What's your outlook on AI, the use of AI in the in the future. And I'm not gonna say five or ten years because man, oh, man, it it's like every hour is it feels like ten years, with with AI stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With AI year in AI years. Yeah. Like, there'll be like, we have dog years, which is per seven years, I think, of human Yeah. Then there's AI years, which is, like, the what what am I looking forward to?
Speaker 2:I think just the things that's coming out of the industry. I mean, very recently, and I'm gonna write about this pretty soon is, AGI that that Sam Altman has said that we've now achieved or not that we've achieved it, but he's he's pivoting the vision of his company. So before OpenAI's grand vision was to achieve AGI, that was its ultimate goal. And now they're looking at what they call superintelligence or ASI. And that's that's that's a type of AI system that is not on par to human intelligence, but much more superior than human than what humans are capable of.
Speaker 2:And now they've pegged that as the as the company's new vision. I mean, I haven't even I don't think I've fully been able to I think I'm just scratching the surface of what what e what AGI can do for us, let alone that next level. So I'm definitely excited to see what other superpower tools they're going to be introducing in maybe twenty twenty six, twenty seven. This is way out in the future. But I think there's a there's a path for us to get there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's that that that's cool. And and it's funny to hear 2627 being way out in the future. Right?
Speaker 2:That's true. It's just next year. The next the next try or not, the next New Year's Eve, it's, what is it, three hundred and sixty days away.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's it's coming coming quickly. Sharon, it's been it's been a great conversation. Any any final thoughts for for the audience before we go?
Speaker 2:I think it's important to start learning about AI, testing on AI. I have a website, sharonguy.com, that you can check out to subscribe to where you can read some of the things that I have looked at and I have evaluated. I'm coming out with a course as well very soon where it's a crash course of what you can do with AI, so you can be on the lookout for that. And, yeah, I would say happy testing and experimenting, everyone.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Thank you so much for for your time. And to everybody out there, we will see you next week.