Sarah Assous is vice president of product marketing at Akeneo, where she drives strategic messaging, positioning and go-to-market strategies. She is an outcome-driven leader who plays a key role in accelerating company growth and leveraging marketing to support revenue creation. With expertise in content strategy, customer engagement and competitive positioning, she combines creativity and business acumen to deliver a world-class product experience.
Akeneo is a product experience (PX) company and a global leader in product information management (PIM). Leading brands, manufacturers, distributors and retailers including Chico’s, Carparts.com, Taylormade Golf, Rail Europe, and more, take advantage of Akeneo’s smart product cloud, application marketplace and partner network, enriching through product data, Joint organizations and joint organizations, as well as joint production, and joint production, and partner networks to create improved product experience vendor data onboarding.
What is different from traditional PIM solutions when Akeneo is described as “the world’s first smart product cloud”?
While traditional PIM systems can effectively centralize and manage product information, many solutions strive to support complex omnichannel strategies, dynamic data, and integration with other e-commerce or data platforms, meaning that PIM is just another data silo.
Product Cloud, on the other hand, is a composable suite of technologies that support the entire product recording of dynamic and static data throughout the product lifecycle; our flexible, scalable PIM solution is a key aspect of product cloud, but It’s just a part.
As part of the Akeneo product cloud, we also offer an AI-powered vendor data check-in solution, a joint platform that activates product information across global markets, a secure product portal, Secure product portal that enables all stakeholders to access the digital product catalog on demand and is integrated with an extensive network of over 150. All of these solutions work together to ensure that product data does not reside in siloed solutions but is optimized, enriched and activated at every stage of the product life cycle, allowing businesses to create the best omnichannel Product experience to improve higher conversion rates and increase customer loyalty.
How does AI convert product information management (PIM) instead of just centralizing data?
Apart from data centralization, AI is a powerful tool in PIM as it brings advanced technology to industries that previously rely on outdated and inefficient tools. In addition to centralizing data, we also see AI used in a wide range of ways in PIM solutions, including:
- Clean and enrich product data, including deletion and data extraction
- Use centralized data to generate ready-made content, ensuring product pages are aligned with brand voice
- Translate product content quickly and efficiently to deliver a powerful product experience in multiple languages and multiple languages
- Optimize product discovery and search capabilities by improving natural language processing and understanding user intentions
Can you guide us through how Akeneo’s AI-driven vendor data manager simplifies data collection and enrichment?
Akeneo’s Vendor Data Manager (SDM) is designed to simplify the collection, management and enrichment of product information and assets provided by suppliers by providing a user-friendly portal where suppliers can upload product data and media files and then automatically Map to the retailer and/or distributor data structure in this file. Our systems utilize AI to automate product classification, enrich attributes of descriptions and labels, and normalize data to ensure consistency and accuracy, all of which reduce manual efforts, accelerate time to market, and provide retailers and suppliers with A collaborative centralized platform for efficient communication and data exchange. As a result, omnichannel success by having consistent supplier insights between systems, brands and/or manufacturers.
What role does AI play in ensuring the accuracy of product data and consistency across multiple channels?
One of the most practical use cases for today’s AI is that it can automate data standardization, enrich and validate processes to ensure accuracy and consistency across multiple channels. AI-driven algorithms can detect and correct inconsistencies, fill in missing attributes, and classify products based on predefined rules or learned patterns, reduce manual errors and ensure cross-markets, e-commerce platforms, print catalogs, print catalogs, and anything else uniformity of the place. In addition, natural language processing (NLP) and AI-driven search capabilities help businesses better understand user intent, allowing them to optimize product descriptions and attributes to match how customers actually search. By analyzing search queries, AI can suggest more relevant keywords, improve product tags and dynamically refine search results to ensure customers find the most accurate and compelling product information, ultimately leading to higher engagement, conversions and reduced returns .
What are the biggest challenges in implementing AI in product experience management? How does Akeneo solve them?
AI relies on high-quality structured data to generate meaningful insights, but many businesses struggle with fragmented or incomplete product information. Scalability is another challenge as AI models must constantly learn and adapt to new product data, customer behavior and market trends while maintaining accuracy and relevance. Akeneo’s product cloud solution features PIM, joint organization and supplier data manager capabilities, which enables retailers to put all product data in one place. We also leverage AI to improve data quality and consistency, ensuring that the information provided to the AI solution is complete, accurate and reliable, which can mitigate inconsistent data across multiple platforms and mitigate with more manual processes The problem of retailers.
With the rise of AI-generated content, how does Akeneo ensure brand voice and authenticity remain intact?
While AI-generated content can be very useful, especially in search features and product descriptors, it is important to maintain a strong sense of brand identity when using these tools. Akeneo makes sure that no matter what type of content we use of AI to help with development, there is always someone on the other hand to maintain brand authenticity. When using content generated by AI, we do rely on it as the starting point for the jump. Ability to enhance and weave brand messaging throughout the content, allowing the tone to be consistent across channels and giving marketing teams time to focus on strategic content.
What AI-driven personalized strategies can brands implement to enhance customer experience?
While personalization is nothing new to brands, AI and ML technologies allow brands to enter new levels of customer personalization to meet high consumer expectations. Knowing the amount of data that AI tools can handle, this feature can achieve unprecedented levels of personalization during customer interaction through data analysis. Utilizing customer data in this way allows AI algorithms to create a wider connection between customer order history, preferences, and more to create those tailor-made product recommendations. AI-driven search and natural language processing can also improve search results by improving user intent interpretation, increasing discovery and reducing friction in the purchase process. However, it is important to remember that without various AI strategies and without a strong data foundation to train and support AI solutions, a customer experience using the technology is nearly impossible.
How does Akeneo use AI to optimize product discovery and search capabilities?
A good product search and discovery experience relies on accurately labeling, classifying and syndicating products into the right channels. That’s why we offer native AI capabilities built within Akeneo PIM to enable rich product data by analyzing existing information to fill in missing attributes, ensuring a comprehensive and accurate product listing. Akeneo SDM also provides AI capabilities to ensure vendor data is complete, correct and formatted correctly. And, if that’s not enough, we’ll also offer 20+ AI applications in our wide range of app stores that cover a wide range of AI use cases, some of which are built for Akeneo. These features help ensure that the right information is provided to the right customers at the right time.
What are the most common bottlenecks when managing product data at the enterprise level? How does Akeneo solve them?
Despite the great advancements in technology in product data, many organizations are still struggling to manage manual product information. Some of the major challenges we see for businesses include managing product information in multiple languages and markets, creating consistent and engaging product descriptions at scale, maintaining accuracy while reducing time to market, and in the technology, marketing team Coordinate with the sales team. These challenges prevent them from keeping up with the speed that today’s digital commerce expects.
For Akeneo, these challenges are largely eliminated. With powerful AI capabilities, Akeneo is able to automatically implement rules for language content translation and uses intelligent content generation to allow the conversion of technical specifications into thoughtful summary and fascinating marketing narratives. It is important to note that smart content doesn’t eliminate marketing teams, but allows them to thrive at the starting point of personalized AI-generated content to fit their brand in the best way.
Where have you seen the role of AI in product experience management over the next five years, and how does Akeneo position it to maintain the lead in these changes?
From now on, it is hard to predict how AI evolution will shift every day in five years. But with the introduction of tools like Google’s confusion, we can expect to see the emergence of AI shopping agents come to life, and shoppers can research, browse, compare and buy products in one place. As AI and NLP evolve to better understand and explain customers’ intentions, these personalized search experiences will begin to become popular and live with traditional search experiences.
While it’s hard to predict the future, we do know one thing: if AI solutions are not supported by a strong foundation of the latest, reliable and complete product information, then AI solutions will always be insufficient. The output created is only as good as the data provided, so no matter where the technology develops, the first step to success will always create a true source of authenticity for product data, which is where Akeneo can help.
Thanks for your excellent interview, and readers who hope to learn more should provide Akeneo.
