Midnight Musings About ChatGPT

By Brian Higdon, The Mars Agency

Help! ChatGPT has taken over a whole lot of my free time.

So when I was thinking the other day of use cases for ChatGPT within retail and consumer goods, I naturally asked ChatGPT, and it said:

• Customer service & chatbots

• Order tracking

• Product search & recommendations

• Personal shopping assistant.

Those are all good, but obvious, use cases. So I pushed ChatGPT out to its farthest boundaries with several rounds of “Keep going. What are futuristic, crazy edge cases?” And here's what it came back with:

• Virtual reality personal shopping

• Brain-computer interface shopping

• Robot-assisted in-store shopping

• Holodeck-style retail experience

• Teleportation shopping

• Mind-reading technology

• AI-generated product designs.

While I'm intrigued (and slightly creeped out) by the concepts of mind-reading technology and brain-computer interface shopping, it sure is fun to imagine the future — especially with an AI brainstorm buddy named ChatGPT.

Here are a few more possible use case cases — off of the top of my own head:

• The honest assessment assistant (“How do these pants really fit?”)

• Next-gen product recommendations, based on all known consumer preferences, tastes and health needs.

• Authenticated rating & reviews — although this tech could also easily be used for fake reviews; we’ll need to police that as an industry.

What other use cases can you see in retail and consumer goods? If you can’t think of any, just try asking ChatGPT.

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About the Author

As SVP-Customer Development, Brian Higdon leads all of The Mars Agency’s grocery channel activity and serves as GM of the Cincinnati office, guiding a team of shopper marketing experts driving growth, ROI and strategic engagement with retailers for our key clients. Prior to joining Mars in 2018, Brian led an independent cross-functional team of consultants and analysts dedicated to the creation of new retail formats and market-winning strategies.