The Safest, Most Effective AI to Scale YOUR Brand

The Safest, Most Effective AI to Scale YOUR Brand Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by Envive and we have Aniket here who is the CEO and founder of Envive and we also have Whitney who is the founder of Whitney Does AI and they're both here to spend some time to talk to you about what does AI really mean today, how you should be using it, applying it in your business and talking about all the little tips and tricks to go and apply into your business today. First of all, both of you, thank you so much for taking the time out to come and join our episode. Aniket, let's start with you with a little bit of background for the few people who may not know you. Give them a little bit about who you are. Speaker 2: Thanks, Ron. Excited to be here and jam with you all. So I'm Aniket. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Envive AI. Our mission is to help brands and retailers thrive in an agentic future for commerce. And prior to founding Envive, I was the head of Gen AI for consumer commerce at Walmart. Which basically is a fancy way of saying that I was responsible for the Gen AI systems that served millions of Americans. 70% of Americans shopped at Walmart in the last two weeks to use generative AI to transact through Walmart.com and Walmart's app. Learned a lot about how people shop online and how AI can help the browsing consideration phases of the buying journey in ways that I was helped through your EBITDA targets. So like in ways that are profitable to the business and excited to share some insights with folks here. Speaker 1: So you knew me before GPT was around. Speaker 2: I tell people all the time that my team is a bunch of LLM hipsters. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's awesome. Speaker 2: We were doing it before school. Speaker 1: Whitney, we'd love a little bit of background on yours. Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for having me. I have spent the last 16 years in eCommerce and about five years ago I started working for a business who was really focused around ed tech and selling education solutions that were content based to college students. While I was there, we were kind of on the brink of this AI becoming normal and every day. Being a content company, there was a lot of pain and friction because students realized very quickly that they could get content from an AI platform like ChatGPT. Being the product marketer there, I really felt this pull to learn how to use AI in ways that would help businesses grow and succeed in a future where AI was the norm rather than have these extreme pain points while trying to compete with AI. I ended up transitioning to head marketing and eCommerce for Supergoop and while I was there started to create a lot of content around AI and educating people, marketers, eCommerce professionals, how to use AI to better their businesses, scale, add proficiencies and ended up taking a leap of faith to do it full-time and now I founded an AI consulting business called Whitney Does AI and I educate eCommerce businesses. Speaker 1: That's incredible. This episode is brought to you by Envive, the most brand safe AI for eCommerce. You know that moment when you're on a site ready to buy something specific, but the search gives you nothing useful and there's no way to ask real questions about the product? That's frustrating. And it's happening to your customers too. Envive fixes that. Their AI-powered agents makes your site smarter, doing dead-end searches and clunky chatbots into real conversations that convert. It's search, sales, SEO, and insights all in one seamless brand safe experience. We'll dive deeper later in the show, but if you want a preview, head to envive.ai slash chew on this to learn more. Now, let's get back to the episode. Well, I think we can say I think we have the experts here that we need. And so I think the number one thing that I'd probably want to start off with right and I think this is probably even selfishly for ourselves for our brand. You know, when you guys think about eCommerce and AI, right, and you look at the parallels of those worlds, what kind of strikes to each of you as, you know, the one thing that you need to be looking at like a sanity check of like, here's the one place you almost have to be using AI or some places that you see like, you know, if you're not using AI, you almost question why not. Are there certain common denominators that you see across almost all eCommerce brands when it comes to using AI or starting off with AI? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. So to play that back to you, it's like, where are those no brainer use cases where you can deploy AI and see value today? So where we tend to focus is where do you look beyond, like thinking beyond customer service, which is I think the thing that everyone is using today, to thinking into the sales process. Like we know that 80% of users who come on site, the qualified traffic, which is more expensive than ever to acquire, will turn off your site if they aren't meaningfully engaged. And so it's all about engaging them meaningfully from search all the way down the funnel to consideration so that you make the most of every dollar you're spending. And AI is a great lever towards doing that across the shopping journey. Speaker 1: How about you? Speaker 3: I think there are so many use cases at this point and so many ways that eCommerce businesses really need to embed this into their everyday. From a marketing perspective, which is my expertise, I think that when you are brainstorming campaigns and brainstorming go-to-market strategies, you absolutely have to be using these tools. And another place that I've seen it become just a huge way to create efficiency and decrease cost is to use it within the creative process. Whether that mean creating your visual content and decreasing the cost of production or using it to help create and draft meaningful creative briefs that typically take endless amounts of time for marketers, for teams, for creatives. So those two areas are some of the areas that I think are hugely meaningful as well as customer service and SEO. Speaker 1: That's a great call out. I think based on what you've been building right last few years now with Envive, I'm I'm very curious on. On the start of how brands are adapting from just a psychological point of view, right? You know, we get to see a lot of different brand founders on the episodes and we get to meet them through our newsletter and stuff. And I think there is this piece of AI, and correct me if I'm wrong if you see this too, Whitney, is like, there is still a lot of hesitation. It's not almost like hesitation that's coming from like, oh, I don't want to do it. It's more so like, I don't know what I should be figuring out or how I should be utilizing it. And then I think, you know, ChatGPT obviously made some things easier, but it also created like this like paradox of choice of like, all right, well, what do I, what do I go and ask it? What do I do with this? I'm curious, you know, especially with building Envive and how the platform serves brands, give us some of the learnings you've been able to access through brands utilizing the platform or brands maybe that were hesitant first and then started utilizing it and what type of benefits they saw. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. So we talked to brands like, you know, what I was responsible for at Walmart, but also what all of our customers care about today is offensive and defensive framing. So offensively, they care about conversion, AOV, LTV, you know, as KPIs. Defensively, it's like, I want to, like, you have a capital V brand, which means you have a promise and a relationship with your users, and you want to protect that brand safety layer. You want to protect your brand from downside risk of deploying AI, right? So those are the two considerations that we see when we talk to our partners and what I was responsible for in my prior role. And so what we want to do is deploy the AI in ways that What was the second part of your question there? Speaker 1: In terms of when you've seen brands maybe be hesitant initially and then they do come on board, what are some of the initial green flags they see or some of the initial upticks they should be looking for when it comes to the benefits? Speaker 2: Yeah, so philosophically, my perspective is the way to think about AI agents, which is the buzzword of this year, is that you want to hire agents where you hire someone For business results, right? So you should be able to hire an agent and tie that to an outcome. So typically that goal for us is conversion, GMV, and then also protecting against the downside risk of hallucinations and other undesirable behavior, and there should be metrics around that. And so the hesitation people see is well-founded because there's not a lot of ways, like, even though we all use ChatGPT and other tools that perplex our personal lives, there aren't A number of tools on the market, whether it's ours or others, that offer the actual promises that solve those key problems where you can hire AI and see a business outcome today. And you see this beyond eCommerce with AISDRs and other tools where there's a lot that have a lot of promises but don't deliver against those. So I think the other part of that is just to work with tools where you can de-risk the process of vetting that it will actually fulfill those core promises and live up to the reputation or to the goals that are outlined, whether it's conversion increase or brand safety. Speaker 1: That's awesome. I'm curious on your thoughts here. There are brands that are obviously utilizing AI, and then there's some of the hesitations we hear, and I like to go attack hesitations first because it usually makes people feel relatable, like, oh yeah, that's me, right? Another hesitation I hear often is like, I don't want my customer to feel like a bot's doing something or I don't want my customer to feel like they're not going to get a good experience, right? And, you know, on the flip side, you look at like their welcome series, and it's like already, you know, missing a lot of elements. It's like, you know, don't worry about some of these things. But like, what do you say to those people that come to you with those concerns? I'm sure maybe you've come across some people who've Come across, come and told you like, hey, I don't know if I want this, my experience to be to impact it or my customers to feel a certain way. How do you kind of approach people who have that hesitation? Speaker 2: So I'm going to answer this in a fun way by asking Whitney her perspective of what this was like at Superview. Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I think there are a lot of, there's a lot of hesitance in general in terms of AI and when brands or, you know, when I was at Supergoop, one of the things that I think comes up a lot is, you know, is this going to feel less personalized if we are utilizing AI throughout all of our workflows when what we saw at Supergoop when we integrated Envive, for instance, into the platform is it actually creates Not just a more personalized experience, but it creates the ability for people to get the responses they need faster. It creates the ability for the brand to learn more about their customer because they're actively ingesting and answering so many questions at such a high volume that they're continuing to learn more and more about their customers in general, which allows them to make optimizations to their product descriptions and their later product additions. And it helps them create products that are You know, more beneficial to their customers because they're learning so much about them at such high speeds because that data is so hyper, it's just so important to a brand. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Can you guys maybe, either Whitney with Supergroup or with some of the brands, can you guys give us maybe some more particular examples of some of the solutions Envive is creating, right? So whether it's Some of the guided shopping or some of the other elements. Can you maybe give us some of those more particular examples of what type of brands need to be thinking about these types of solutions? Speaker 2: When we launched with Spanx, what we saw right off the bat was just, and what was really valuable to the Spanx team was not only the GMV improvements, which were material, but also just the new way that consumers were engaging with Spanx as a brand. And that's really special, right? Like when women are asking about, hey, what should I wear to a Taylor Swift concert? You know, like brand is, Spanx is the Kleenex of shapewear, right? Like they have that brand authority, but now consumers want to engage with Spanx. In having these more vulnerable questions and you're forming a relationship based off that and you're understanding what your consumer's intent is in a whole new world than, you know, relying on like your SEO keywords kind of thing, right? That's incredible. And that to me is the thing that you can like turn on a switch and start flowing through and accruing that data creates a lot of interesting opportunities down the line from a business perspective for improving SEO or ranking in generative engines, but also like from running your business for merchandise planning, like being on the pulse of what your customers care about. For customer service and other use cases just like I think we all agree that being closer to your customer and understanding what their needs are will help you better plan and operate your business. Speaker 1: How much goes into the technical creation of the prompting of this or what to ask when and how that works? Again, I'm sure the way you guys have built the platform is inclusive of that, but I think it'd be really great to understand, does that come from the brand needing to think some of these things and get ahead of it or is it also coming from You guys and from the platform side of it, hey, this is something that would be good to learn or maybe this is what was ingested and we're going to turn this into material data. Speaker 2: Yeah, so the question is sort of like how do we architect and build a system so that we can get the value from it, right? So yeah, Whitney, I've kind of riffed on this, but the way to get value out of AI from first principles is like it's all about the data that you feed it. And the techniques that you use. And so I'm really blessed to have an amazing founding team. So my co-founders are coming from places like Google Research, where they're responsible for AI trust and safety and basically training these foundation models. The reason we do that isn't because we like to solve complex technical problems. At least I like to do things simple. So like, you know, like, but the reason we do that is because we wanted to train the model to like, what we realized is that Whether it's if you're selling shapewear or washing machines, the skill or sunscreen, the skill of engaging your users and selling each product, there's a skill there, right? And what we do is kind of like Neo from the Matrix, like training the model with the data sets that you already sit on, unlocking the value of those through a training process and grounding that through reinforcement learning in the actual conversion events that you have. And that's what creates the skill to meaningfully engage your users, because we all know when something's written by ChatGPT, right? But the value of the brand is it has to be in your brand voice, which we train into the model. It has to be trained in your assortment, which is what we train in through our training process. So that, to me, is the core value of when you're evaluating AI. If you're getting, how do you actually get value out of it? Is there a training process that is actually making use of that data to get to the desired outcomes? Speaker 1: That's incredible. I think this is something that, you know, Ash and I, my co-founder, we often talk about is like, right now, for people who come into Obvi, right, we have people who come in for either beauty through our collagen, so their hair, skin, nails, or there are women who are coming in for our fat burner product, which is, we have a collagenic burn, so it's a fat burner plus collagen, so it's weight loss and beauty. And I think sometimes the problem we have is we don't actually understand why they're there even though we can follow the path of what ad they clicked on, right? But we don't understand if they're there to get beauty stuff and they also want to lose weight or they want to lose weight and like they'd like to, you know, also care about their looks. Or if they're just there for just getting to regrow their hair because they're post menopause, whatever it may be. I think some of this stuff like you can try to get it out of like maybe doing a little pop-up and like asking like, what are you looking for? You can maybe study their behavior, what they click on, right? But so much of it becomes like such a task of this manual data read. That you also often just get lost into like, I don't have the time to do this, or you end up hiring someone to do it and it's like, well, how do I value what material they're, you know, giving us in a data format. And I think like, if there was something there for us that was One, being there systematically, helping our customers make the right decisions, but two, learning about our customers. I think in today's place where like, one, it's really hard to get customers to be loyal, because there's so much of everything, there's no barrier to entry to a lot of different product categories. And two, you know, everyone talks about hyper personalization. But no one really talks about how challenging it is sometimes, right? And I think we've moved way past just making sure you put first name in the email and down to like, hey, tell me exactly why you're here to buy and I'm going to follow up with you. And I think we crave that a lot, but there hasn't been enough solutions out there that is geared towards making that part easier. And I do think that's something that's impressive that you're building there. You know, Whitney, I'd love to address, you know, what are some of the common misconceptions that you see with AI or some of the ways that AI is being used that you'd almost kind of frown upon from some of the brands you're working with? Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the, I'd say, misconceptions are from the creative side of the business. I get a lot of hesitation from, and I'm not a creative, so, you know, I'm just going to address that. But when I am working with teams and working with creative teams and marketers to help them understand how they can weave AI into their workflows to generate content, There is a lot of hesitation on is this going to remove the value of my skill set? Is this going to take away from who I am as a creative and who I am as an artist? But I think there's such a huge misconception there because there is an incredible amount of creativity and an incredible amount of creative knowledge that you need in order to be able to make the best use of these AI tools when you're creating visual content or written copy. And, you know, something that I see a lot because I'm constantly creating content in this space is that there are incredible Graphic designers and creatives who have really embraced AI and what they can create versus what I can create when I'm prompting these tools is night and day. They're so much more effective than I am because they actually know what to tell a content tool to create because they have the visual creativity, the knowledge of making something beautiful. They know what to tell the platform to make it work really well. I can do the same exact thing without any of that knowledge and things come out terribly. So I just feel that like creatives and marketing teams who are really focused on visual content creation, if they are AI first, they have the ability to do hyper personalized visuals that can grab the audience's attention on all of these platforms in a much better way if they're, you know, Making room for that in their tech stack and feeling strongly about AI from a positive standpoint and not fearing it as much as I hear people do. Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned something important here, which is like making room for AI in your tech stack, right? And I think part of it comes down to like who are the user personas, right? I think, you know, you look at an org like Obvi, we're 10 people, right? We have three co-founders, and then we have, you know, a video editor, we have a graphic designer, we have a finance person. We have an ops person and then we have a sales team and a customer service person. You know, let's kind of break down an org like mine, right? When you go in and look at, let's say, the creative team, so video editor and graphic designer, right? Would you recommend a brand to go and say, hey, empower them with maybe certain tools within the AI infrastructure and say, go and utilize this and utilize it first and then do your job as you usually would? Or is there a module or necessity of training? You talked about adding it to your tech site. How do you think the best way to do that is? I think the starting point sometimes is like, all right, well, there's so many tools. Even sometimes like when I'm utilizing, I have like Claude, GPT, Gemini all open and I'll like feed each other the answer of the last one. I'll be like, make this better. And I'll just keep going down the line. And I'm like, I don't even know if I'm using this right. Like, I'm just, I'm just doing it to do it. So I'm just curious, like, what are some of the maybe more systematic ways to approach it? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think what I've heard from so many brands and just speaking to so many people in person and on social media is that the foundational knowledge of how and which ways to use these platforms I think has to come first. And something that has been very eye-opening to me as someone who is constantly digesting these AI advancements and trying to understand them and apply them in real practical ways is that if you're not constantly obsessing over that, it's really Difficult for you to realize like this is a capability at this point and I can use AI this way. So helping teams and that's what I try to do when I create content as well is show them practical use cases based on what they're doing today. Whether it's a graphic designer, whether it's someone who's responsible for conversion rate optimization, whether it's someone responsible for creating go-to-market strategy, showing the real practical ways like in real life How to use this solution because it changes the way that they think about the tools and how they approach them. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Speaker 1: And do you think like from there are you seeing brands that maybe are on the larger size? Have they adopted and incorporated to where like, you know, you see, I think it was maybe the, I forget which brand, which company it was, but they said, you know, if you're not using AI, that's a problem. Are you seeing companies get to that stage now where it's like, okay, go to AI first before you ask me to hire more people. Is that kind of the way you're seeing adoption right now? Or is there still kind of Back and forth of like, yeah, I use it, but I don't rely on it yet, right? And I'm wondering, are we supposed to get to a point where we rely on AI? Is that the goal? And what's your viewpoint on that? Speaker 3: I think there's a huge gap in terms of different brands. I think some brands are at a point where they're like, you absolutely have to try to use AI first. And if you're not using AI first, and if that doesn't work, then let's figure out, you know, whether we need to use AI in a different way, or do we need to hire a different, or do we need to hire a person at that point? But if you're not approaching your problem or the ...task you're trying to achieve in a way that creates efficiency. I mean, let's face it, the most important thing in our businesses and in eCommerce businesses is time, and there's not a lot of it. And so if you're able to create something as well or better with an AI assistant or agent or platform, then If you're not able to do something faster, yes, you need a person or you need additional skill set. But I think in almost every role and in almost every seat in an organization, there's a way to use AI to advance yourself. And I've heard a lot of companies start to think about doing a hackathon where they like stop doing work for an entire day and instead just like come up with solutions on how they can integrate AI into their workflows so that it helps the entire organization start to think differently. Speaker 1: Let's get back to Envive because this tech is honestly changing the game for e-commerce. Their AI powered search understands how people actually shop and Typos, vague queries, natural language, and their sales agent act like the best rep, guiding shoppers and answering questions in real time. It's all designed to protect your brand while increasing conversions. And here's what sets it apart. Every interaction powers deeper insights. You learn what customers are searching for, what content's missing, and when they're dropping off. It even helps you rank better in LLMs, so you're not just fixing on-site friction, you're preparing for how discovery works now. Envive is helping brands like Spanx and Coterie prepare for the next era of commerce, where discovery is conversational, AI native, and always on. See it for yourself at envive.ai slash Chew on This. Now, let's get back to the episode. Aniket, question for you. You gave that incredible example of Spanx and how they're able to utilize the platform to some of their advantages. Can you maybe boil down some more examples like that and more so from an example of when you use, let's say, a platform like even Envive, what are some of the North Star metrics to look at that are going to be the ones to say, all right, this is working or this is creating the benefit I'm looking for? What are some of those North Star metrics you ask brands to look at? Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. So it's all about, like I said, that philosophical consideration that AI, you should hire AI to do a job and have a metric associated with that. So then we have agents for conversion, for search, And so the metrics are typically like GMV conversion rate improvement, sales and search, and then for SEO and GEO, so improving ranking in both the traditional SEO and generative engines. And the improvement for that is like how much more traffic are you getting, right? And so it should be very unambiguous to look at that. And of course measurement can get tricky because if you're a brand and you're running multiple tests, it can be too challenging to look at. But that's why we have everything instrumented, so you have multiple ways to look at performance from a metrics perspective. And we also like to look at the actual session browsing behavior, because what's really interesting is obviously the quantitative information is really helpful, but the qualitative, like really looking at the user behavior and the new ways that users are engaging is also really interesting, because that shows that Intent was latent. It was always there, but there wasn't a way to capture that until there was a new way to interact with the brand, right? So those are some of the ways that we find that people are successful in deploying our platform and their brand. Speaker 1: Can you go deeper into that and give us some more like, and you don't have to name the brand, but like some of the tests that or some of the integrations that some brands that have been able to bring in through your platform? Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. So just to put it back to you, what are some ways that brands have been able to be successful with the platform? So we start with, we work with categories that are higher considerations. So think about sunscreen. Sunscreen is a medical device. Fun fact for me. Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Wow. And then we work with other medical devices, but also think about Spanx, it's a technical garment, right? Even coterie, it's like diapers, but as I mentioned, but you will attest to like, you put diapers on probably the most important people in your life. So, and so there's a lot of consideration that goes into that and what people, and so what we find is that If you take CoderAid as an example, they have some specific claims that they're making. This is true for everyone making claims. There is a Federal Trade Commission and they have specific things that you can and can't say, and you need to stay compliant to those. Outside of the obvious thing, which is like, hey, I deployed this AI to my site. Was there more conversion? Was there more GMV? It's also like, how do you measure the downside risk of making sure that we're not violating any of those claims? And that we're consistent in both to our brand standards but also to FTC guidelines across the different ways that people can engage. And so we have metrics that are constantly looking at monitoring that so you can have that confidence that there won't be any of the downside risk there. Speaker 1: That's awesome. You know, the SVP at Coterie Encore was actually on the pod two weeks ago. He talked a lot about the intent of the customers and how much they know about their customers and how they even predict when a customer may churn and whatnot. It gets me to think, how does the tool you've built play in this line of both acquisition and retention? If you look at it from an acquisition point of view, you have traffic coming and you're obviously trying to make them convert better, maybe grow their AOV, obviously get them to give you information so that you can understand them better. But from a retention point of view, when a customer maybe comes back to the site, how does Envive engage differently or recognize that and how does a retention cohort work differently with the platform? Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's a great call-out. So like I mentioned, the three metrics everyone cares about are always like conversion, AOV, and LTV. And LTV is the most interesting, especially as we're engaging with more folks that are in that subscription space where really optimizing for that repeat user experience is important. So today we go based off of like if you're authenticated or if you're not authenticated and we have a cookie of you and we have some way to store that session context, much like when you use ChatGPT, you can come back to that and we can maintain that context and the continuity. And then where we're going is going beyond that towards as you're authenticated, Or if there's ways for us to know it's you in ways that are safe and reliable, then how do we create that experience not only on the site, but outside of the site, engaging with you across other platforms in a headless way? And like, pardon me, I'm going to go a little bit on like a tangent, but a fun tangent, which is like, you know, when we think about where all this is going is like, like I mentioned, our mission is to help brands And retailers prepare for this agentic future. And what we see is just like we saw with headless is like agentic headless, where it's going to be important to become where your brand will become an agent in some capacity. And you would want to engage with customers across other channels and platforms and maintain that continuity and context of knowing where someone else Because what might happen, you know, is like, as ChatGPT utilization is like, is growing exponentially, like, it's very likely that like, some of the larger foundation model companies will have all the user context. Like, I don't know about you guys, but OpenAI knows an embarrassing amount of info about me. And so like, so maybe they have a lot of that customer context, but your brand still needs to be an agent to like, basically have those agent to agent interactions to facilitate that context and make the most of it in order to Ensure that customers, when they come back, first of all, that your brand is the one that's discovered, but then also to facilitate those repeat purchases from an LTV perspective. Speaker 1: That's really interesting. I'm always intrigued, for anyone who's in the AI space and building in the AI space, the vision you guys have into what's possible, it's kind of crazy to think. It's so true. At the end of the day, you look at the core of where the information is sitting and can the experience just start to become totally different? We're all used to buying a certain way right now, but will that completely be different in five years? And maybe at the rate of where it's growing, it can be. Which is really crazy. Whitney, question for you. Now, in terms of, you know, we talked about from an acquisition point of view, and from a retention point of view, we also talked a little bit about like integration into teams and priority. I want to look at like, Is there a point where you've seen AI to be used in customers who have churned or who have just been like close to sunset or maybe just didn't have any real life to them affiliated to the brand? Have you seen AI being used in any creative ways there in that cohort? Speaker 3: So I'm going to approach it from a data perspective and think about my background is in conversion rate optimization and really thinking about how we make the most of the customers that are already customers and visitors that are already visitors on our platforms. And something that I've seen recently was If you look at your Shopify data and you basically download everything you possibly can from Shopify and ask ChatGPT in a very detailed way, I have a whole script on this, but if you ask ChatGPT in a very detailed way to look at your customer cohorts by those who are likely to churn, by where your customers land and where they're likely to drop off in terms of your funnel, The insights that even a platform like ChatGPT, a free tool, the insights that that can generate if you templatize that process can tell you so much about your customer base that you can then turn around and make changes to the way you're marketing, to the way you're talking to your customers, to where you're sending your ad traffic, to what and where to send your emails and who to send your emails to. And it's extremely powerful if you can You know, download your data, format it appropriately, and then take a history of conversion rate optimization tactics, train ChatGPT, and then ask it to do all the things that would typically take a conversion rate optimist or optimizer, CRO. Speaker 1: Days it could do it in minutes, and it's actually incredibly powerful and something that you know I find to be fascinating and and do you think like the the Sometimes I think like the the information you get output right like it starts to become like well. What do I do with this right? Are there if you get down to a point where I? You have an output and you're like, all right, well, I don't know what the next step is. Is that usually from the fact that you probably didn't frame or prompt it well enough to get the right guiding point? Or do you see, you know, a little bit of development that's going to happen over time where, you know, you get a bunch of this information. It's like, hey, this is the better way to run these ads, maybe these types of creatives and this. And it seems like there's a lot of things you have to go and change and do. But then it's like, where do I start? What do I prioritize? How do you think about that? Speaker 3: I think the most important thing is when you are feeding ChatGPT or any AI tool data, is letting it know that you want your responses prioritized by most potential impact down to least potential impact, which is how I would deliver a conversion rate audit to a business in general. And that's the same thing I was talking about as a creative, right? I'm not a creative and creatives can prompt way better than I can because I don't have their knowledge. But I have the knowledge of someone who's done conversion rate optimization for 16 years, and I know what questions I would ask of myself, I know what questions my clients would ask of me, and I can take all of that and ask ChatGPT the right way to prioritize based on impact and where to start. Speaker 1: That's incredible. Thank you. A wealth of insight there. Thank you both for sharing. I'm going to get into what we like to call like a rapid fire round. So I'll be asking the same question to both of you. And feel free to be as elongated or short as you like. So Winnie, I'll start with you. Is there a defining moment that shaped how you lead or make decisions, especially when it comes to AI? Speaker 3: I think what I said early on and why I actually ended up diving into AI is I was leading product marketing for a business that was just incredibly negatively impacted by this technology and it drove me to become completely obsessed in finding the right ways to apply it to a business to help them scale and grow effectively and make sure that they're not missing the boat in relation to all of their competitors. So that was definitely it for me. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Aniket, is there a defining moment that's shaped how you've led to make the decision to even build Envive or some of the advancements since you built it? Speaker 2: Oh man, what a wonderful question. So it's like the Envive origin story, but I would say it kind of goes way back to 2019, which is crazy to say this, but a year after OpenAI was founded and Walmart's board was very excited at emerging technologies like AI and it was an object back then it was like people were talking about NFTs and it was like AR, VR. It was a very different time about what was what was most important and so I was you know through some work and also through some good fortune I ended up being in this role which ended up like leading these gen AI efforts at Walmart and For me, that formative experience was like, even then, those early models like GPT-2, what OpenAI came out with, and using effectively a copy of that with Walmart's data and seeing the impact of that, I had this aha moment where I was like, man, if you look at how AI models scale and LLM scale, as we just train more data into this, this is going to be gangbusters. And that ended up being right. And I was like, man, I got to We got it, we got it in the game here. This is going to really change how consumers behave and so that was that was like my seminal moment. Speaker 1: That's amazing. Speaker 2: And it's a treat to be here and see where things are at. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, it's incredible to act on it the way you did. So that's amazing. Aniket, we'll start with you on this one. What's one best practice in eCom you secretly think is actually bad advice? Speaker 2: Oh, what is one best practice... Speaker 1: I'm coming to you next, Whitney. It's the same question. Speaker 2: This is CRO. Speaker 1: I'm sure you have a laundry list. Speaker 2: Can you slip me some? Oh, man. Okay. What is one best practice in eCom? CTA or just the way that we capture user Like first party data today is like super under-optimized and I think encourages churn more than it encourages engagement. Like, you know, when people have intent, you gotta, you gotta strike all the cards hard. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great answer. How about you? Speaker 3: Maybe controversial. I think that... Speaker 1: We love controversy. Speaker 3: I think that we hear the word hyper-personalized all the time and we've been saying it for many, many years and I think There's a negative to that in some cases where you kind of over, you overemphasize the amount of time you're spending trying to personalize your business for your customers when The tweaks you're making may or may not have any impact on the audience you're trying to serve. There is certainly a time and a place for personalization, and I think AI is going to allow businesses to do that much more effectively, especially in email and on-site. But I think for years, teams have spent time just digesting and spending far too much time trying to manipulate their segments to create hyper-personalized scenarios that honestly end up Taking way too much time for the actual return on investment of that personalization. Speaker 1: Great great great call out and I think we're falling into that bucket unfortunately where we're just like we should really get down to every detail about this person and like. You'll spend hours, sometimes days, into it, and then you even send out a campaign, and you're like, wait, that did not really move the needle. We would have made that same amount of revenue had we not had to go that detail. So great, great answer there. Actually, Whitney, I'll start with you this time. I don't want to put you on the spot. But when was the last time you made a decision that went completely against the data? Speaker 3: As a CRO by nature, that's a hard one. Speaker 1: Yes, I know. Speaker 3: I will tell you in terms of creating content as a content creator, I have a struggle with this because I want to do everything the algorithms say I should do and my content should be a certain length. But in terms of wanting to deliver real value to my audience, especially on a short form platform like a TikTok or Instagram, I want to deliver real value. And so there are many times where I create a 90 second piece of content and I know that it's not going to scale because I understand how the algorithm works. But I have to do it because I want to provide the value and if people see my content I want them to be able to learn from it. So there are just times where I have to create content outside of what the data tells me I should be doing so I can serve my customer the right way. Speaker 1: Great answer. Thank you. Same question to you. Speaker 2: Founding Envive. Really, the chances of building a company and starting up a company, you do this, are very, very low. But for me, it really comes back to the mission. Like what I said before, I knew that these LLM laws meant that, and scaling laws meant that there was going to be an exponential increase in the level and sophistication of these models and that consumer behavior would adapt. And I was like, man, Walmart, by definition, is Fortune 1. Amazon might be Fortune 1 now. So there's like two companies with the resources to really build against this. Everyone else, by definition, has resources but needs tools to be successful in this new era. In the same way that they did with eCommerce and then mobile, right? This is just a new technology that wasn't previously possible. And so our goal was to, there's a mission here, but it's not obvious to me that this would be a thing. So that's probably it. Speaker 1: Well said. Last one for both of you. What's one belief about AI you changed your mind on? I think it will start with you. Speaker 2: We originally believed that AI would be more of a co-pilot, the way that we see GitHub co-pilot. And so what we originally built for Envive, the V1 of Envive, was more like sales co-pilots for folks with inside sales teams. It was super effective. And so we didn't think that it would be possible to create fully agentic experience. Like basically what we have now, my engineering team told me like back in 2023, early 2024, like this would be Like infeasible, there'd be too much like, just serving it would be too expensive. There'd be too many issues with hallucinations. We wouldn't be able to train the models to be able to be effective now. And so we, but we changed our perspective. Obviously we changed our perspective there. And a lot of that is thanks to just like, you can't anticipate how advanced things will become and the other techniques, how techniques will evolve. And then, and that iteration is happening faster than possible. And so it's really interesting to take that same thing, like what's going to be true a year from now that we don't think is true today. Speaker 1: Fair point. What do you think? Speaker 3: For me, when I started using AI and when it started to become sort of the topic amongst everyone, I was really concerned, even as a mom, that those who were using it, students that were using it, were going to sort of reduce their critical thinking. Whereas, as someone who's using it every day for so many different things and helping businesses do the same thing, something that is fascinating to me is I use it to teach myself on a very frequent basis. For instance, As I said, I'm not a creative. When I want to understand how to create a piece of content and I want to understand why something has worked in the past, I will Kind of explain exactly what a working piece of content looked like to ChatGPT and ask it to break it down and teach me from a psychological perspective why a certain piece of content hooked an audience, why a certain piece of content held them there, what about that piece of content really drove them to stand the test of time and engage with it and then it breaks it down psychologically for me so I can learn exactly why creative content is working. It's actually teaching me As someone who is very data-driven and sort of analytical, it's teaching me sort of the principles of creativity and how to story tell properly and you know I think that's something a lot of people don't realize is you can use it to really educate yourself in a different way. Speaker 1: Awesome. Speaker 2: I also got a bonus extra second response. Speaker 1: Yeah, let's hear it. Unknown Speaker: Oh yeah, we have all the time. Speaker 2: Oh man, so I really love what you said and kind of like on that same thread of like what are things that are counter what I previously thought where I kind of changed my perspective on where AI is going was just this idea that AI is like GPT-4 would like what I talked about things are getting exponentially better so GPT-4.5 would be like a huge improvement the way that GPT-4 was over GPT-3.5 right but what we've seen is that GPT-4 is certainly like 4.0 and 4.5 is certainly better but not like that same step function you know and so there is some open thinking around there's there's a punchline here for everyone but you got to kind of like come along with me for the ride right so the ride is this is like what if like All these AI models are trained on the entire internet and we've exhausted what can be trained. And if that's true, Cloudflare, which basically runs the internet behind the scenes, they just launched this new feature that allows you to basically monetize your traffic to your site. So you can basically charge open AI or perplexity. Five cents per whatever to crawl your site. So there's an interesting opportunity to realize that if you actually own your branded experience, then that's an interesting modernization channel because these models are only getting smarter based off of data that's available to them. And so how much smarter will we actually get with GPT-5, which is supposed to come out later this summer and has been delayed twice now. So we all thought that there was going to be exponential improvement, but what we've actually seen hasn't necessarily been that. Speaker 1: Very, very interesting. Well, first, again, it's especially in a time like this where probably every call we get on, every other founder we meet, any dinner we go to and whatnot, this is probably the top conversation that comes up. I'm sure for you guys as well, obviously, just given the space you're in. So this is super, super helpful conversation. You guys have a wealth of knowledge here and so much to unpack. What we like to do at the end of each episode is if you had to give the viewers one thing to chew on, one thing to go do and or apply in their business today, it can be regarding AI, it doesn't have to be, you know, and Whitney we'll start with you, what's that one takeaway you want people to leave with? Speaker 3: I mean, I think I'll just piggyback off what I was sharing before about CRO. I think the opportunities within your business that you can really start to understand if you understand how to take your data and use it in a way to learn from your customer behavior so that you can find gaps immediately. I think that is such an eye-opening experience. Not only What you find out from the data, but going through the step-by-step process to do that with ChatGPT, when I've had businesses or founders or marketers do that and go through that process, every time they do it, they're like, wow, I had no idea AI was even capable of doing this. I've thought so differently now about how to interact with AI platforms because of going through this process. Not only are you learning about your, you're exporting your customer data and exporting it into ChatGPT and, you know, prompting it in a certain way. Not only are you learning about all of the opportunities you have and the gaps you have and the revenue you're sort of leaving on the table, but you're learning exactly how to interact with these platforms. And it gives you a different perspective on what's possible. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 2: Yeah. So, like, Chew on This, right? Like, I don't know about you guys, but my LinkedIn is full of, like, weird AI fear-mongering, especially with some of the announcements of, like, OpenAI doing inline shopping, native shopping, you know, and stuff like that. Like, will brands ever exist again? Guys, someone still has to buy inventory and merchandise it and do all that good stuff, but more importantly, in the end of the day, the consumer is king. What's happening with AI has happened before with eCommerce and then with mobile. Each time there was a technology breakthrough that wasn't previously possible, consumer behavior shifted towards that because there was whatever, like eCommerce is a new distribution channel. Mobile, it's like we're all doom-scrolling and then we're going to SuperGoogled by Sunscreen because we saw Karlie Kloss wearing it. At the dog pound, right? And then what's happening with AI is there's a new way to shop which is more convenient in certain ways and if you follow the thread of like what's a better consumer experience, then you will be just fine. Speaker 1: Chew on that. If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.