Publicis Groupe’s Profitero is launching a version of its commerce analytics software backed by generative AI called Ask Profitero, an apparently first-of-its-kind application of AI in the space that may open it up for use much more broadly within marketing and other company functions.

Early beta users include Colgate-Palmolive Co. The potential to let more employees use text queries to get insights driven by trends in customer reviews—to shape everything from online product description pages to product development—is among the more intriguing possibilities, said Todd Hassenfelt, Colgate-Palmolive’s global digital commerce director for strategy and execution.

Profitero collects data on pricing, in-stock levels across the country and across retailers, sales trends, performance of various paid search queries and other advertising, reviews and competitive ad plans, among other things. But finding ways to glean usable insights from all that data isn’t always easy. Opening things up to a nearly unlimited range of verbal queries could help, Hassenfelt said.

For people who already use Profitero data every day, “this will allow them to get information faster,” Hassenfelt said. “They can allocate resources adequately quicker than trying to do it manually.”

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The types of queries users could input include ideas such as “list my top 5 bestselling products last month” or “what images make people buy,” for example.

Generative AI also has the capability to inform decisions across more than just e-commerce, Hassenfelt said. “Digital shelf is maybe a bad name, because it impacts the physical shelf too. Profitero has done a great job with the reports they’re doing on digitally influenced sales.”

A system based on verbal queries also makes it easier to set up A/B testing online or in physical stores or just mine trends in online reviews to identify marketing propositions or product development needs, he said.

Online searches, offline impact

Ask Profitero was built to solve two types of problems, said Sarah Hofstetter, president of the Publicis Groupe company. One is managing a wide range of data, including sales, supply chain and media spending, in a way that a wide range of users within a company can use it.

“We could have a client that might have 300 or 400 users of proprietary data in a given month, so how do you democratize that so the right people are using it for the right use cases,” Hofstetter said.

The second, related problem, is helping marketers understand the role that retail digital media plays in pre-sale purchase decisions, she said, to get beyond the “last click attribution” problem that attributes every sale to the last ad or promotion a shopper sees online or in stores without accounting for the full range of marketing that led up to that decision.

The announcement of Ask Profitero dovetails with a study conducted by the company showing the impact such things as e-commerce reviews, retail search buys and other retail media have on broader sales off the sites where they appear, including in physical stores.

For example, Profitero found 58% of shoppers visit retailer websites to check prices and deals before shopping in stores and 51% to check product reviews before in-store shopping. The percentage of shoppers who say they do research on retailer sites before shopping in stores is virtually identical among those ages 18-44 (78%) and those over 45 (76%).

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CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the format of the inquiries.