Shopify gets into the game with its new AI agent 'Sidekick'

🥽 3 TRENDS

Shopify launches AI assistant for retailers called Sidekick. (link)

Shopify is introducing a generative AI assistant called Sidekick, described as a highly competent helper that can assist independent retailers and simplify their lives.

The assistant aims to help businesses compete by acting as a marketing department, offering knowledge and support for online stores.

Shopify's CEO, Tobi Lütke, presented Sidekick on Twitter (see link above) as a powerful ally to help retailers succeed and take on their biggest competitor, Amazon.

Meta and Microsoft extend there relationship with the release of Llama 2 on Azure. (link)

Meta extends its partnership with Microsoft to make its new family of large language models, Llama 2, available on Microsoft Azure and Windows for commercial use.

Llama 2 can be used by developers and organizations to create AI-powered tools and experiences, and it comes in 7B, 13B, and 70B-parameter versions.

This partnership aims to democratize AI access and provide businesses with foundational open source and ‘commercially licensed’ AI technologies to build innovative products and solutions.

TED announces TED AI an event focussed on the power and impact of AI. (link)

It’s really cool to see TED focussing exclusively on the impact of AI on business and society!

TED AI, organized by Sam & Walter De Brouwer in collaboration with TED's head, Chris Anderson, offers a full day of talks by pioneers and trailblazers exploring the profound impact of artificial intelligence on society, industries, institutions, communities, and cultures.

Speakers will share their work, visions, hopes, and perspectives on the benefits and challenges of integrating AI into our lives.

For those that can attend, this is a not-to-be-missed event.

🛠️ 2 TOOLS

 FOR THE ENGINEER

Text to Flow Charts with Whimsical.com 

One thing we find ourselves doing before writing every proposal or thinking about a technical strategy for a client is building out a flow chart.

Quickly generating flowcharts and diagrams from text is a new AI feature that whimsical.com has developed and it is worth playing with.

You get all the ‘Figma-like’ collaboration features built in, coupled with the new GenAI tooling and we think this is a trend that will continue to grow.

 FOR THE PRESNETER

Verble.app is trying to be your all in one speaking coach.

Have you every needed help preparing for a large presentation in front of a massive audience?

You may want to take a look at a new public speaking coach and presentation wizard called Verble.

Verble is an AI tool designed to elevate your speaking skills and create impactful public presentations.

It’s a tool that supports you from start to finish, helping you present confidently and persuasively, even if you are scared to be on the big stage.

💡 1 TAKE AWAY

Use Google Bard to help with competitive analysis

In just 2 steps, try using a large language model like Bard to quickly create a breakdown of all your competitors in a particular region and get a list of their revenue and earnings based on publiclly available records.

Step 1: Ask Chat GPT to list competitors of your company

Step 2: Ask Chat GPT to provide a table with the competitors and their critical information that is needed for the competitor study.

Depending on your industry this exercise will open your eyes to who you are up against and how you stack up.

You can see that when you are very specific with the output (columns, informaiton) it is easy for LLM’s like Bard to organize and visualize this data for you.

PROMPT 1
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Please help me do a competitve analysis. First check out [Insert your company name] website: [Insert your website]. Give me a list of other companies that [describe the industry and products or services that are similar to what you sell] and are competitors of [Your Company Name].
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PROMPT 2
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Create a table with these competitors with columns to show their countries of origin, revenues and year, net earnings and year, and their year of incorporation. Please check their corporate web-pages if necessary. For non-US dollars, convert them into USD and put it beside the non-US dollars.
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