How we saved over $100,000 by using a.i.
While you’d have to be blind not to be aware that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made some big steps in the last couple of years, most people don’t understand just how much the world has changed in that time.
Tess and I have been running ecommerce stores since 2006, so let’s me start by telling you what we have changed just in the last 12 months.
– Replaced most of our customer support team with AI
– Replaced our photo editors with AI
– Replaced our models, makeup artists and professional photographer with AI
– Massively reduced our reliance on our web developer (replaced with AI)
– Took our branding to the next level with AI
– Replacing videographer with AI
– Generate our advertising creatives, headlines and text with AI
And here’s what many people TRULY don’t understand. These jobs are NOT coming back. Yes, this is a brutal reality for those people who had those jobs, but we as business owners cannot afford to use them anymore. Eventually our competitors will do the same, and to remain competitive you either embrace AI or go out of business.
Please understand this.
Let me give you a REALLY clear example of how serious this is. One of our businesses involves dresses. Up until last year, if we were to receive new dresses from our factory, we would have to wait until the dresses arrived at our warehouse in Australia. Then hire our photographer, some models (different sizes to show how each dress fits on different sized women), and a hair and makeup artist for the models. After the photoshoot, we then needed a photo editor to turn the raw photos into polished edits for the website. This process used to cost us thousands and thousands of dollars. It also took a lot of time, as you had to fit into the photographer’s schedule.
Now? Our factory can take an “okay” photo of a dress of any size on a mannequin of any size. We can take that photo, and use AI to put it on any size model we want, of any ethnicity we want. Each photo costs us $1-2USD. A $10,000 shoot now costs us a $100. Not only that, but we can have the whole “shoot” done before the dresses even get to our warehouse, up and taking pre-orders. And guess what, in the last couple of days we’ve now found an AI tool that can turn the AI photos into AI videos of the model walking towards the camera. Crazy.
Get it now?
It’s not JUST about saving a fortune that you can now use on marketing (with the help of AI of course), it’s about time-to-market as well.
So. If you are in business, and you aren’t using AI, then you MUST start right now. It’s not optional. If you are looking to start a business, you actually have the advantage, as a) it’s easier than ever before, and b) you aren’t weighed down by “how we’ve always done it”, or not wanting to fire people who have always worked for you.
You ALSO need to understand the rate of change. None of this was possible 12 months prior to writing this. The dress images on the models only became indistinguishable from the “real thing” within the last 6 months. The tool to turn them into video at the level that we need has only just happened.
Given all this. What “impossible” AI possibilities will be reality in the next 12 months? The next 2 years?
Why It’s Hard to Keep Up
When most of us think of AI, we immediately think of Chat GPT, and most of you have used it to some degree or another. Chat GPT is certainly great at some things, but many times we are often frustrated at the results we get. There are two main reasons for this.
Your Prompts Suck
Chat GPT is heavily reliant on great inputs to be able to return great results. Learning how to ask proper questions is not as easy as it might seem.
The Wrong Tool For the Job
Do you think we use Chat GPT to create videos of our dresses on AI models? Of course not – it’s not designed for that. Chat GPT can also write a great title and description for your products, but ask it to do hundreds and it will break and give you unusable data.
Learning how to write great prompts takes a bit of training, but we can all get there with a bit of help (part of our guide below).
Finding the right AI tools for the job though, well, that’s a bit more complicated, and has been one of the biggest time wasters we’ve had on our AI journey.
So many tools claim to do what you want, but after signing up and giving them your credit card details, you find that they are just using the Chat GPT api anyway, and often still give you the same bad results.
The truth is, AI models are extremely compute intensive to train, and the more generalised they are (like Chat GPT) the more expensive they are to run and improve, and the more likely they are to be “a jack-of-all-trades but master of none”.
This is why task specific AI models are popping up, and will continue to do so, and will be much better than Chat GPT at specific tasks. Add to that, you can also train some of these (including Chat GPT) to get better and better at achieving what you want them to do.
So what next?
The whole point of this article is to make you aware that learning about AI is non-negotiable, whether you have a business, or a job, it’s coming for you in one way or another, and you can either embrace it or ignore it, but it will affect all of us. If all we’ve done is encourage you to find new and exciting ways to help you utilise AI in your life, then that is great, as too many people are ignoring one of the biggest changes in human history.
If you’d like to see how we use prompts, and what tools we are using (constantly updated), then sign up below and we will send you our latest guide.