Each month we go in-depth into topics discussed in one of the Master B2B Boardrooms, our monthly roundtables for B2B eCommerce executives.
What we heard in the Boardrooms:
We took the Master B2B Boardroom team on the road and spent 3 days in Chicago at the B2B Online conference. If you spend a few days with a few hundred B2B eCommerce execs, you start to hear some themes emerge. So, if you only have 8 seconds to read a recap of the event, here it is:
“B2C-like experience”
“Omnichannel”
“PIM”
“Digital transformation”
“Personalized experience at every touchpoint”
“Ensure your product data is structured right”
“Unified view of customer”
“We’re a large organization, and we’re at varying levels of digital maturity”
“AI”
We put “AI” last on that list, not because it’s least important, but because it’s the thing we’ve been thinking about the most from the conference. Those first 8 ideas could’ve been from almost any B2B or B2C eCommerce conference from the past 15 years.
AI was sprinkled into nearly every conversation, but it was clear that few people on stage really knew what to make of it.
Why that matters:
In our Master B2B Boardrooms we’ve had a whole bunch of conversations recently about AI, specifically around ChatGPT-like functionality and how it will affect business.
We had been thinking about AI as a tool or as functionality – something akin, maybe, to a website personalization platform in that it was something you could use, or choose not to use. It would be an optional bit of functionality that you could layer on top of whatever you’re doing.
But it’s become clear from our conversations with practitioners that we were thinking about it wrong. We’ve started thinking of it less as a specific tool and more like, say, cloud computing – a concept that powers a massive variety of different tools and makes things that existed before far more powerful.
We had cable TV before cloud computing. But we didn’t have Netflix without cloud computing. We had Amazon selling books and CDs without cloud computing. But we have modern Amazon selling everything because of cloud computing.
You can’t opt out of the cloud (not really, at least). That’s how we see AI – a layer that makes an unthinkable variety of functions more powerful.
What to do about it:
Depending on the culture of your organization, we see two paths forward:
For more conservative companies, we heard Adrienne Hartman from JJ Keller (and a friend of Master B2B) share something at B2B Online that seemed apt:
If you’re in a digital role and you want to make a change that’s going to affect the organization broadly, you need to lobby your CEO. There’s really no other way around it – without CEO buy-in, in most organizations you’re going to get pushback when you try to make changes. Lobbying is, itself, an art, and doing that successfully takes time and requires you to tie the changes you want to make to the main goals of the company.
In these types of companies, think deeply about how AI is going to impact the stated goals of the company, of how it’s going to help the organization meet those goals sooner. Then go lobby the CEO. Without CEO buy-in, there’s a good chance you’re going to get pushback.
On the other hand, in smaller, more nimble organizations, we heard a suggestion in a Boardroom conversation that we really liked:
Pick one business problem and use ChatGPT to solve it. It can be a small problem (writing a piece of code that will automate a small process) or something bigger (automating email subject lines). But having a project with a successful outcome to show to the broader team will show that these new technologies are real, and will have a real day-to-day impact on the business.
