Host intro & session overview And we are back folks for the last session of day one of of Prepathon. What a day this has been. I mean we have had we have had so many insightful sessions, panel discussion, activities which has sort of brought us to this last session of the day and this is equally exciting because we are discussing uh AI we are discussing again e-commerce myths uh what’s working in AI what’s working in marketing and also because we have two amazing guest speakers with us today uh Miriam Schwab head of WordPress at element Miriam if I can have you on stage really quickly thank you so much Miriam for being here and then joining her is VTO Pere from Atarim. He’s the founder of Atarium. So, thank you so much, Vero, for being here as well. Uh it’s it’s a pleasure to have you both again for for for Prepathon and obviously I’m sort of having this feeling that we are sort of getting used to this arrangement of having uh you both at at our online events. How are you feeling? How are you feeling Vo and Miriam about about this prepon and the online event? Please go ahead Miriam. Okay. We we still don’t have that down path the I mean it’s an amazing event. It feels like every each time you guys do it it gets better better higher quality more polish. Yeah. So from that perspective kudos and you’re bringing really great content to your you to the visitor to the viewers and the audience that’s tuning in that is really actionable they can use in their dayto-day which I think is amazing value. So also great job on that. That’s awesome. I love how it’s broken down into these topics. So every every few few weeks or a couple of months we have something new to uh to dive into. I love that. Yeah. Awesome. So without any further ado, let’s get straight into the questions uh for for for this session. So Miriam and Vo this this session is around e-commerce strategy check. I mean and and the reason why we wanted you to sort of you know take up this this topic is because we are going to be talking a lot What’s real vs. hype in AI for eCommerce about AI in in this in this session and since you both have been working so much and your your products have been working so much on around AI and bring you know building products and bringing it in front of the consu customers uh where they solve real you know AI AI problems which which sort of brings me to to my first question of of this session I mean there’s so much noise around AI in e-commerce I mean uh when it comes to you know being a page builder or any collaboration tool I mean there’s so much happening in AI when it comes to specifically e-commerce from your experience what is exact what is actually you know delivering results right now and what is just the hype if you want to start us off with that sure um so I think that the way to generate results and that’s with AI but with any other tools in the e-commerce space is do not one thing and that’s usually not the easy answer but that’s usually the case where it’s a combination of a few different elements that bring that kind of impact to the table and you mentioned the the usefulness of some of those creation tools the design tools and we saw that audit that just happened uh before we joined in on the previous session there um also from the collaboration perspective that’s a crucial part to be able to execute at the speed and all those kind of things. So, uh if we’re looking at it from a perspective of where does this sit, everything contributes in its own way. But the way that I would try to look at this is first of all uh is uh trying to um understand what are the things that we have have done uh as humans over the past few years inside e-commerce and try to find the tools that will give us the better lift into the things that we’ve already been doing. So rather than the completely new things that are out there, how can we be more effective with the things we already know that worked? And uh there’s many examples of this uh in the in the AI space. Not so much the out of the box completely brand new type of marketing, but uh mostly uh just things that we that are tried and true, but only faster, quicker, more effective with sense. Miriam, would you like to weigh in? Agree or disagree with Veto? I agree with VTO. Um that uh I I definitely think that what we’re seeing How AI helps scale everyday store operations with AI is that uh the things that we’ve all been doing, the activities that we’ve been trying to execute on where we’re just people or more people or even bigger teams is, you know, there’s a limit to what we can do and how far we can scale things. There’s 24 hours in the day. We have to sleep. we get sick, our kids get sick, you know, whatever. And so it makes us all less available. Whereas when AI comes into the picture, it allows us to almost infinitely scale the activities that we should be doing anyway. We just can’t. It’s not I think people can feel bad about what they they aren’t doing. But like in the end, we we really have to like not we can’t work more than 24 hours a day and we should not be working 24 hours a day. So because we have to sleep. So uh with AI we can do things faster, more efficiently and in many ways better. For example, bulk activities. So, if you’re managing an e-commerce site and you need to like uh modify a whole line of products and change them, let’s say now you would either need a developer to run scripts for you, which is expensive, creates blocks and things like that. Or now with AI, you can, you know, upload things and have those types of uh repetitive tasks happen automatically. Um, an example of that is, uh, Elementor’s new agentic AI tool called Angie. Yeah, which is an early access which is uh integrates with Woo Commerce and allows these types of bulk actions in a really cool way actually allows you to do things that let’s say in the past would take you an hour to set up and you have the capabilities to set it up but now you could just tell the AI to do it for you and within 10 minutes you’re done. So, so those types of things I think are going to give uh online uh sellers of various kinds way more opportunity to maximize the potential of their business. Chatbots & support automation: value and limits Awesome. Uh let’s talk about things that have been uh part of AI for quite a while. So chat bots, product recommendations, these are some of the things that we have been seeing over the last couple of years or so. Where have you seen AI make the most direct impact on sales or retention? Miam, if you want to. So, chat bots can be great and they can also be terrible. And um I think we’re not quite yet at the place where you can depend on an AI chatbot to you support your either previous buyers or future buyers and give them the quality experience that they need and deserve. And that will also bring you the seller results. If you want your chatbot to work well for you, you have to spend a ton of time, investing in it, tweaking in it, and you know, configuring it so that it it works for you. But even then, I think we still need a h you humans to be around in order to keep that in that human touch and and like a real touch in the in the picture. I think we will get there where chat bots will be able to take over more of the time that we spend on supporting our customers. Um but even then I would just warn all of us that we should not fully remove the human experience. um in almost every the case of all everything that we are selling whether it’s services digital products like Elementor’s products or physical products if you’re like uh if selling you know anything through a store people are engaging with your brand with who you are with what your vision is what your messaging is and what why you’re selling what you’re selling yes there’s a lot of transactions that happen just because they’re cheaper and whatever you know that kind of thing but in many cases that matters and will continue to matter because we in the end the buyers the sellers are people. So the chat bots are good it’s good or there they can save some time but I would just suggest that we all keep an eye on it uh for the foreseeable future so that we still deliver pay attention to our customers and get the results that we we want. Keeping the human touch in AI-powered CX I would like to strengthen exactly what Miriam is saying here that I think that the question was u specifically around where do we see the most impact of AI uh in sales and uh or retention and and I think that it came to a place where it is where you sometimes don’t implement it and where you strategically decide to put a human in the loop as a kind of we call it now uh to um uh to use the AI on behalf of this communication type of element. So if we’re talking about this from a chat perspective and I give an example, we just had this discussion in our support um literally this week where some someone came in and suggested you know we have this feature how about we do it now because we we already known about this for a long time but uh they kind of resurfaced it. How about we just turn on the the chatbot and we can save talking to about 60 people a day. you know, that’s was the stat the stat that came up uh that came up there. But most of the stuff that come into our support are kind of positive. The their questions of how to use the product the um not so much of like people um they’re all they’re all people that just want to engage with the product. And so because we don’t have mass mass scale of support, I think that we can allow ourselves to actually have these conversations and have a have a human jumping in in under 90 seconds and have and and delight the person that is on the other side. But from a revenue perspective, we also consider this for other two opportunities. How can we leverage this quick question that the user may have may have had about one of the features that we have or anything like that and to leverage this into a positive review or to an upsell within the uh of the product itself. So while our team has access to an AI that is trained on the product so that they can surface the qu the answers and vet if the answers are correct as well before shipping this to the customer. They use AI to reformat some of their messages to check that the the way that it’s written um is in line with the with the kind of the the voice that we have. The human is still there operating it and having a real conversation with the user that is on the other side in real time. So, I think that that’s where we see the most uh value in it. And I and I would even suggest that for most folks, especially when you’re talking about e-commerce, um in the early days, unless you were like Asus or Amazon or something like this, but especially in the early days, uh having building those relationships with the clients, that’s what gets you those recurring uh purchases. And that is very hard to replicate with AI still. No, there’s a few that are now talking about this. Uh uh there’s a there’s a campaign here in London in all the tube about this uh my friend, you know, the AI friend that you can uh um hang out with, you know. So maybe it’s going into this direction, but for now I think that the human experience Old-school channels still winning: email & SEO definitely prevails, especially if we’re trying to build a brand. Oh, think you’re muted. Yeah. Sorry. Let’s now let’s now divert from AI and and talk about marketing channels. I mean uh in your experience and in your view uh what do you think uh are the marketing channels that are still pulling their weight this year in 2025 and which of the channels have you know started to decline a bit as of now? Vo you want to get us? So whenever I think about this kind of perspective, I try to zoom out a little bit and I’m I’m looking at this from a a there’s an interesting concept of the audience, message, channel and system. And those four components together um bring you that winning channel. But the channel in its own is only one of the four that you need to unlock. So who are we targeting? Who is the audience that we’re trying to approach? that would tell you uh usually where do they hang out, which is where you would want to be seen at, you know, and so um so again, if we’re if we’re considering this specifically from an e-commerce uh uh perspective and and in those early days of trying to build that brand, um um niching down is always a smart move and and I’m sure that this is something that came up in a lot of the conversations uh as well uh today. But the but the point of this is that once you have that niche that you’re serving, it’s a lot easier to figure out where do these people hang out and make that the channel that is probably going to be the most effective for you. And I’ll give an example. Uh we work with a lot of e-commerce brands. So, I show up and have a and I join this amazing uh event to talk a little bit and to share knowledge and and and that wouldn’t be as effective if I would just do it on a on even on a broader scale of a TED talk or something like this because most or put ads inside on the YouTube underground because it’s so broad that I would probably waste a lot of the resources. a lot of the eyeballs that are trying that I’m trying to get in touch with are are just not focused enough. And so that audience message channel and system uh perspective kind of gives you that rounded up uh uh approach to figuring out where is that channel that you want to be seen because it definitely differs for each one of us. I’m gonna like go really dumb, but but in so many cases, dumb works. And one of the most effective channels to this day, even though it’s so old school and like from the dawn of the internet, is email. It just still is. It’s crazy. We’re like all so modern and for the tech technology is taking us forward and there’s a billion different ways we can communicate with our users, but in the end, email has such a great It it targets the user, they see it, right? I mean, obviously not 100%, but the the rates are high, they click through, they convert. Like, if you have a high quality email uh list with segments and, you know, making sure that you’re targeting the different segments, recognizing who they are, then it just works really well. with AI in the picture and being able to personalize that even further then it just becomes even more powerful so crazily that’s still maybe one of the best mediums for marketing and then the other one which is also old school and still matters even in this age of AI is SEO and content marketing it just it keeps doing its thing and now with M’s is eating up that content. So on the one hand you we’re in this like struggle of well LLMs are just eating up our content and so then they don’t have to send users to your site but depending on how you it’s still there’s still a connection between how you’re ranking in SEO and how you’re appearing in AI um output and that will still generate brand awareness and engagement even if it’s not on your site and eventually people to your site. when they want more information and that continues to be the case. So, so we still got the old school stuff and then of course there’s paid marketing whatever which is still, you know, if done well works well. So, not that exciting. It’s the same old same old stuff. All right. And that and that was literally the question I mean what’s working and and what’s not working. So, a lot of people have this impression that now that we we are with AI and a lot of a lot of things that used to work before might not work in the same manner. But as medium said that you know SEO and in content marketing still works and it still produces results. So that is one thing that we can take away from from from here. Before I move on to my next question, I just want to remind everyone in the comment section that they can do ask their questions from Vero and Miriam and we will dive into Small brand strategy: data quality & analytics for AI the comment section in the middle of the session to take those questions and uh take answers from from Miriam and VO. So moving on to my next question, it’s and I want to address this to towards the smaller e-commerce stores. I mean the larger stores, they might already have implemented AI or different marketing channels and they might already be starting to see results from it. But the smaller brands, the smaller e-commerce stores who are just sort of coming up uh you know they often have this challenge of you know applying uh quality data for AI and automation. So how would how should smaller e-commerce brands approach data quality for AI and automation? So maybe I can share a little bit as to how we’re approaching this uh um internally as well. Um and and that has two sides to it. One is uh one is when it comes to raw data that needs to be uh that needs to be collected by the AI or processed by the AI. That’s one component. Maybe Miriam, I think that Andrew is exactly that type of thing that allows you to surface this very very easily inside WordPress uh uh full show. Um I’m trying to also look at this from a perspective of how do we tell that story uh um throughout the entire experience. So as we’re as we’re dealing with e-commerce and there’s a bunch of products for each one of them there is the descriptions that tell the story of the thing the whole thing needs to be uh um consistent and especially as we’re then going into support folks that need to understand what is available what are the features or what are the uh um options that are available for each one of the products that we’re we may be serving. um for for us as a software there is a lot of layers to it. And so one thing that I felt the need of doing and that was uh ve very uh powerful um is I basically recorded seven hours of uh of me going through the entire product from the top left icon and to and describing it in words for everything that I see not only what but also the why and uh what’s the kind of use case and h and how this is set up in there and went into every single button every single feature every single micro feature that is in there h to describe it in as many detail as possible. that created about 400 pages of a transcript that uh was then fed into an AI that uh basically knows the platform and you know and so I did that once and now every team member in the organization every customer that wants to know some of those things we have this as a public uh custom GPT as well for people to kind of go in and uh and and talk to learn and know what is going on inside the product inside it and out as much as the person that thought about it you know and that I think that that that removes a lot of the barriers that a lot of companies have especially as you’re starting to have uh different folks that are managing on there. So um explain it in your own words, transcribe the whole thing and then you already have a huge asset that uh can um can not only tell the story properly but knows the the why you know and that is a lot of times where things fall. It’s very cool. Yeah. Um for so I would say for smaller brands um where you know the resources are more limited and things like that then it’s important to focus on not too many sources of analytics. Analytics are critical for whatever it is that you’re doing because if you can’t see what’s happening for real, then you can’t take action to fix things, make things better, or identify issues, right? You should always be keeping an eye on your analytics in case there’s some kind of issue that’s happening with your e-commerce site that you’re just not aware of. I would say not to try to have too many analytic sources where it can be hard to track it and bring them together when you’re when you’re a smaller brand. But invest in making sure that that those analytics are let’s say it’s some kind of analytics on your site and your let’s say email analytics or something like that and dream of a day which I think it already exists to some extent but it’s I don’t know about tools that can do this automatically and I think the analytics tools will start to offer it more and more where you can chat to your staff and say what age is bringing in the highest quality sales. Like everyone who lands on uh this page, I’m a flower shop. This page about roses, may not end up buying roses, but they’ll buy a product that’s over $50. Okay, great. So, I want more of those types of pages. AI, what’s good about that page? Why is it working so well? And how can I optimize that page? You know, like I at the moment, you can do that by exporting your analytics, feeding it into an LLM. This is what I know. Yeah. And maybe there are tools that do it and then and then talking to the to the AI about it there. But it would be great if on an ongoing basis. You could either ask for information or could proactively offer you information like fix this, fix that, do this. You have an opportunity optimize the content here, create another page like that. I think it’ll be really cool and like create that level of automation, higher quality data analytics. It’s actionable for users. So, fortunately, I don’t I can’t tell people exactly how to do that now without exporting and importing to the LM. But, well, you’re describing our two. This is exactly what we’re doing. The inner circle. Oh. Oh, right. Right. There you go. Someone is doing it. Stay tuned. Yeah. That that type of thing in general and like Yes. What you guys are doing in general will be amazing for smaller brands. Yeah. Expanding their team. Yeah. It’s it’s what you’re doing. Yeah, great. Exactly that. Like really the perspective was to create that or we Introducing agentic AI tools (Angie, Inner Circle) call it the first agentic creative team and very much like Angie uh the inner circle is also now in early access and there’s a a few thousand people that are playing around with this uh in the background in the next few uh days maybe maybe week. Let’s see if uh the team will will get it uh wrapped up. H it’s going to be live already. Uh but people can already access this if you go to um adarim.io-access. / early-acess uh um to try to to to to have a look and basically what it is is it’s a team of agents that are each are expert in their own field and they have access to those additional tools where they can fetch information like an SEO report or an accessibility report and then they review the work based on your intent whether this is to improve the conversion rate of this page or or to improve the SEO or find any problems that may happen on this page. before we before we launch this new landing page for Black Friday. So it’s it basically does what we’ve been doing for many years which is uh um allowing for feedback and so now feedback is not only human to human but now AI is providing the feedback. This is exactly where we’ve uh we’ve lean into it. Awesome. Let’s let’s talk about another buzz word that has been going on in in the in the industry and that is hyperpersonalization. Right? I mean a lot of e-commerce stores are implementing hyperpersonalization so Hyperpersonalization: opportunities & privacy challenges that they can get the most out of their store so that they can get the most sales but at the same time there are data and privacy concerns and you know different regulations that are sort of uh popping up in different regions of the world. So how do you think this uh hyperpersonalization concept is sustainable and what can e-commerce store do as an alternative? I mean if if if it’s not hyperpersonalization then then what else can they implement? So if if VO you can you know start us off with that. So I think that the the personalization up until now was was more of a matter of personalizing it to the name of the person or the location of the person but uh but AI gives and and that and that was done because these were the available tools let’s put privacy aside that was the available tools for uh for website builders or for for marketers to be able to pull in geolocation to try and fetch the name in from all kinds of different places and things like that. Erh now uh um now we’re going into intentbased personalization and so that is a completely different level in my mind rather than saying like uh it’s nice that I can say hey Moise uh it’s great that you’re visiting this page I know that you live over there maybe that will be relevant for you that’s that’s valuable um but what if it knows what you’re actually looking for um and and helps you surface that so it does in fact personalizing the experience completely for you. And we even seen an experience like this uh by um uh by Claude. It’s like an experiment that they just launched. I think it was two days ago or something like this where the website creates itself as you engage with it. And so um that’s super super experimental and it takes a while and you click through and it takes a time for it to generate. Literally every page is generated based on the steps that you’ve done during this session based on the decisions that you’ve made during this session. So it is personalization that is based on your own personal intent rather than available data uh or kind of more more what we would now probably start considering as generic data which is my name and my email and things like that. Now it’s literally can be tailored to me and that’s mind-blowing if it will go into this direction. Oh, someone here in the chat is um pointed out privacy. I think that that’s that’s uh the message here um about how privacy concerns are a real concern here and I agree. I think we can commerce brands can personalize around the information they have gotten from their users first of all. So this comes back to let’s say email marketing or things like that where let’s say you already have a history of purchases or history of usage of your user of a user who’s let’s say logged in and has agreed to share their activity with you has communicated with you about certain things so you understand their interests maybe even during some kind of onboarding Intent-based personalization & real-world examples registration process you’ve gotten some like them to identify their interests um then you know from that point on you can personalize based on that and of course going forward it can evolve with the user Then there’s the kind of uh not directly given information about user which is their their behavior. So they’re not logged in, they’re not this, but but you can kind of see, oh, they keep looking at this brand of shoes, right? Let’s help them see more of that or similar things to that. Like a lot of things, AI uh does some that sometimes does things really well and sometimes does things really badly. So again, like I’m not sure how at this point how much we can depend on AI, you know, really understanding what a user wants and then continuing them helping them continue on that path to uh ideally a sale or some kind of success. But I do envision a like that we’ll get to a place where uh what you’re describing VTO, these kinds of like on the-ly personalized experiences will start to happen for users. I I saw it today. I I sorry. That’s okay. I I saw that when I was about to cancel a subscription to some service and uh and then it asked me like the reason for it and then it cited a bunch of and then it wrote in real time. You could see the like the um the tokens coming in basically uh and it gave me a personalized message why I should not cancel the subscription. I did still but it was still cool to see this is something that is happening but it didn’t end there. After that, I got an email that was personalized email based on my usage, based on what it could find through augmentation tools about uh my business based on the domain or with my email that was signed up and basically gave me a story of why this would be the right thing for me to do fully automated from the founder within seconds after the after turn happened. That’s very cool. Yeah, I do just want to also mention here um the new e-commerce instant commerce that OpenAI launched in conjunction with Shopify and Stripe. It’s a new protocol that will then be able to be rolled out to other platforms and other products that I think is in some ways almost the ultimate form of personalization which is that I tell Open AI at least at this point. They want to research buying new earphones and it tells me ask me questions. It’s Adapting marketing for regional and cultural differences like a personal shopper and I tell it what I’m looking for and what my budget is and it gives me a bunch of options and then right there through open AI I can already make the purchase is only available in the states at this point and only like I said with certain uh products but it will be interesting to see how that evolves and how much people want to engage with a shopping experience like that but that is a personal shopper taking you to the product that’s hopefully ide is ideally ideal for you. Yeah. Uh that that was that was very insightful. Uh and this next question is is is uh is a question that is very relevant to this particular event because we have people joining in from various part of the world from various regions from different continents. Uh and the question is that does every marketing strategy work the same way for every region or is there region based different marketing strategies that you have you know applied in your uh in your career so far that you could sort of share some examples of how they were different and and most importantly why were they different based on based on specific regions. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Um, I feel like uh a few people in the chat asked about WhatsApp and WhatsApp is like a great example of it being regional. So, Americans don’t really use WhatsApp. Okay, now a bunch of Americans are going to chat and say, “No, no, I use WhatsApp, but like they don’t, you know, they they use I think iMessage, iPhone. There’s an assumption that everyone has iPhones there or something.” So, so WhatsApp marketing would not be effective as much in the states. But in other parts of the world, especially parts of the world where, let’s say, the internet quality is not as high, WhatsApp is an amazing solution for marketing because, you know, I think pretty much everyone has it at this point, it seems like. And it it can be a really great way to communicate with your users. They’re living in WhatsApp anyways, and just getting messages to them that way can be great. So I think that’s just one example of of how some like one platform can be great in particular regions and not great in others. Also taking into consideration bandwidth availability in certain regions and things like that is definitely something people need to keep in mind. Privacy, GDPR, you know, you got to keep those things in mind for especially in certain regions. So it definitely comes into play. I think from the this comes back to that audience message channel and system kind of framework that uh that I think I would applied to to these type of decisions. Um like you’re saying Miriam um the channel of using WhatsApp is relevant in some regions in some areas it has it’s probably going to um there’s probably others you know that you should uh that we should choose uh but then I would also flag this in terms of the message itself and and um I have a friend that uh um that wanted to expand into India right they had a really successful business in the US and uh and they thought that they would have a really interesting uh market in the Indian market, right? Uh but they had no one from India in the team trying to approach that market. And so they sent a couple of people over there for a couple of days to kind of hang out and try to understand what they can learn. Booked a bunch of meetings. They came back and said, “No, we just can’t do it. There’s there’s no way that we h we can have the uh the the enough context and information to market to a market that we’re not part of. we’re not a part of. And I think that if we’re thinking about this again from that niching down perspective, if we try to serve the people that we know, we’re much more likely to nail the message to those people if you are them. And so um so so that’s definitely true for for territories and we’re even seeing this here from I’m I’m based in the UK and uh and and and marketing to the US is different from marketing to the UK specifically. And so um and the same thing in every region in Europe, they have their own mentality, their own the way, their own way of doing business, their own uh um pricing considerations, the things that move them into actions or or moves them uh out of action, you know. So it’s very much uh a matter of getting to know the niche that you’re serving and the audience that you’re serving and and I would just say generally it’s a good shot to go after us and figure that one out. uh because it’s just a huge market with a lot of buying potential. So um um so that that really is what we’ve been doing. Instead of trying to win everyone, we’re trying to focus on one, but it’s still big enough to help us win. I just want to add to that. So like from the localization perspective, people think that localizing your product for an area means translating and charging in their currency, but it’s so much more. It’s also cultural. What holidays do they have? you know, marketing around that and speaking about their lived Localization & translation with AI + human review experience. At Elementor, we decided that we’re going to start localizing in certain markets and we actually hired people in each market and we’re opened up like offices there. We have in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain now. Not just localizing the content. It’s more than that. It’s the cultural. It’s showing up there. It’s being part of that lived experience. And then you can really speak to the people you’re you’re you’re selling to. This is where AI can actually help combined with the human experience of translations because wow that’s a huge job and it’s ongoing. AI translation can be sloppy but with a human in the picture it can go way faster than it used to. So that’s that’s a win actually. I love that. Awesome. Uh I would like to now jump into the Q&A from from our audience and I see I see a question which is very relevant to the today’s world and I think I think I think you both are the best person to sort of answer that question. Let me pin it on screen. Uh so they say that they’re quite concerned Q&A: Staying creative and relevant in the AI era about the advancement of AI and its adverse effects on the skills of creatives. How do you think one can manage the situation without losing relevance in the creative world? I think a short brief answer from each one of you could be could be very helpful to to to this gentleman and then to anyone else who might have this concern. So, you want to go first? Yeah. I think that it’s it’s a matter of um we’re now no longer the creatives. Uh we are now the orchestrators. And so um if you have a team of uh I think the best example that we’re even discussing internally and it’s not only in creative it’s in every single role uh that is out there. Um, if you’re doing a role that is um that um that many people can do, which is pretty much any role out there, then it means that eventually through uh context and engineering and prompt engineering and building agents that think sequentially, they can get to a similar result to what we’re doing. That’s just the reality. It’s not that oneshot AI that uh that um uh we’ve gotten used to over the past couple of years. It’s it’s critical thinking over multiple steps and that is what makes skills that’s what creates uh level the a level of skills that is that are required. So I think that from this perspective um being the person that manages the fleet of the of the people that you are you have an edge over that but you got to make that transition. You got to have that realization that we’re essentially all becoming in the traditional world managers. Yeah. Uh in the in the modern world, we’re basically uh um prompt engineers, you know, prompted context engineers so that we can we can replace the job, we can replace our job with the use of multiple AIs uh that are just going to do that at much greater scale that we could have done uh previously. And so less exciting, less creative for sure. I’m a creative person at heart. And uh I think there’s going to be some place for it in art, you know, but in uh in business, I don’t think that that’s where it’s going to get to. And I think that a good example for it is uh is um when Gutenberg was invented, then a bunch of people um or I mean when the when the printing press got invented, then you didn’t need a bunch of people to actually write books with with uh with ink, you know, with pens and ink. uh when uh when uh when photographs got invented then you no longer needed the creative people that spent sometimes decades perfecting the realism of uh of paint and both of these have become art rather than um rather than the stuff that we produce or that we consume as in production. So I think that this is exactly what we’re going to see and even in our e-commerce space we see that very often now nowadays. I literally me used to spend countless of hours uh um shaping a a logo into a mockup of a bottle just to make sure in Photoshop that it sits just right with the shadows and all of those kind of things to create like uh those mockups of of products. And now it’s literally 3 seconds away in a prompt. I just upload the the the butt. I upload the logo and I ask it combine it. It’s literally two words and and then you get what you took uh an hour to do no long not long ago. So I think that that part will still be effective from an art perspective if we want to kind of practice that. But from a business perspective, think of yourself as a manager. That’s the next level of a creative if you really think about it is that you have a team of creatives that you just direct. And this is really where what AI gives us each of us the ability to become today. Yeah. So I think um it’s like another age of different types of evolutions that we’ve seen VTO’s examples were were very good where tools are introduced that create greater efficiency around a particular area. In the case of AI, it’s like many areas and allows people to take their input to let’s say a more strategic level. In the past, if you want to write a book, you you sat and wrote it. That was a good example. And now you you get the content out. That was the goal. The goal is to get the content out. It also shifts where the creative story happens. So in the in the case of books, for example, there’s still art around books. There’s even there’s art around digital books as well, right? Like even the layout of the page, the font, there’s a whole world of fonts. I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. I mean, Claude is so interesting because their whole identity is based on their font. I love it. You can totally see when someone’s been using CL, right? Gorgeous. The creativity shifts to a different place where it’s still needed. And also I think it’s just another example of what the power of a tool depends on who wields it. Yeah, we’ve had some really great tools already from the last decade or two that have given people more and more capabilities. Photoshop is an example of it. Figma, you know, AI wasn’t in the picture, but there was always a difference between amazing, gorgeous, creative results and let’s say something that I tried to do, which would look fine and nice and good enough, but if I want something gorgeous, I would go to someone in our design team at Elementor and they would create something gorgeous. And it gives us all more capabilities. So now I can maybe create something gorgeous. Something that’s going to be mindblowing is going to depend on how someone prompts it. Their vision and how they manage to get that vision onto paper, so to speak, right, through AI. What I’m saying is creative capabilities and talent, I think, will always have a place. It’s just now the very creative people can do way more and faster and the rest of us will become some more creative and have more capabilities and not always have to depend on those super artists who aren’t always available. So it just gives us all more capabilities but creativity matters. Awesome. U Miriam and V we’re just going above time as well because we are seeing some questions in the chat. So just wanted to take one more before we wrap up. So, so this question is around around uh around applications, right? I mean, with AI being marketed as a game changer in e-commerce, what’s actually driving ROI and which AI applications are still more experimental or nice to have? I mean, they’re asking your recommendation on how to sidestep the hype. I mean, how to sort of judge if Essential AI tools vs. hype — how to prioritize you know, this particular AI application or tool is, you know, it’s just, you know, at the stage where it’s, you know, it’s good to have. I mean if you don’t have it that won’t be an issue but which tools are actually essential to have and how can you differentiate between the two so uh I would go to what we mentioned in the beginning which was the uh around think of the things you’re already doing what does AI do now that you are actually doing as well now manually and start there and so I’ll give an example um something that we found very useful is having a subscription to open art uh which is like um like an AI tool that that that bundles all of the different image generation type of tools that are in there. You can have the images, you can have the videos and uh and we have our little characters in there or even like there’s 40 images of me that were uploaded into a character and then all of our thumbnails are just created not only with AI but the the the faces the the the expressions the kind of like the the features the backgrounds are then created with AI uh exported from them taken to Canva for composition you know for being for like editing them together Um uh but but that for us was uh something that took a bunch of time uh for me and you need to take those shocked pictures for the YouTube thumbnails. You know all this kind I never liked it. So now AI does it. I did it once and now AI does the rest you know and that’s cool by me. H same thing if we’re talking about this in ecom that’s product images. There’s so much that you can do with just having beautiful, beautiful product images to elevate the quality of your brand. And um and really it used to be a matter of uh inviting the photographer, going to the photographers’s uh uh studio and they had that little desk, that little table with the white kind of background and you’d put the product in there. You need to have the product physical. Um and then they would take photos and then if it’s not that great, then you’re stuck. Yeah. So now you have like unlimited production uh abilities for all of these types of stuff. So that’s why I think open art is a really useful tool as an example. But if we’re looking at for each one of us is a little bit different. If you just uh look into your calendar or your I track my day through the calendar. So if I look into the calendar I try to see what are the things that I did that I shouldn’t be doing that I should find a way to automate through AI or through like a Zapier type of tools. But that has been an exercise that was uh that or mentality that I kind of learned already a decade ago with in the world of Pabi make uh Zapier and it just became on steroids or superpowers now with the help of AI. Um so there’s a there’s a lot of opportunity but it’s really is personal to each one of us. Find what you do and then Google. So go to Chachup and ask it what is the AI tool that does that so I don’t need to do that anymore ever again. Oh, I think we’re at the stage where there’s just like a prolifer proliferation of tools and it’s overwhelming and on the one hand you’re like I want to try everything but then you have FOMO because you can’t try everything. It reminds me I’m of the old school days of the early open source web when there was like a of PHP solutions forums blogs etc etc. What happens is eventually things consolidate, things kind of uh stop being maintained or certain things win and then the everything kind of settles and then you certain winners emerge. I’m at the stage where I’m trying to figure out what the winners are because I don’t have time to waste the slashinvest in things that aren’t really going to give me what I need. So I would like what I’m seeing just is my perspective. I’m like really impressed with Google’s tooling. It’s hard. is all they’re they’re releasing so much that it’s actually hard to keep track of it, right? I would pay attention to that. Obviously, Nano Banana is like one of their most well-known ones right now, but they have these gems that you can use. You can pretty easily create your Closing thoughts & wrap-up own like kind of mini apps there. I’m struggling with figuring out how to automate my work like what you’re describing, Veto. I haven’t solved that yet. It’s like a AI hasn’t done the job well enough for me and I’ve really tried and I’ve been like pushing it and begging it and it’s not so great. Um, but I’m paying close attention. What can you do? Don’t stop it. But I would like to be replaced somewhat. I need more time. So yeah, I’m so I’m paying attention to Gemini. Also, what I really like about that, at least the potential of it, is that it ties into Google Workspace and so much of my life is there anyways. So I’m I really want Gemini and Google Workspace to automate my life. Anyways, that’s where I’m trying to go with that, but I haven’t solved it yet. But just we all just have to kind of test things where we can pay attention to what seems to be winning and what seems to be really like delivering and consistently and um go from there. Awesome. And with that uh we are at the end of this panel discussion. I want to thank Veto and Miriam for for being here at this uh at this year’s Prepathon and you know making it you know a successful event yet again. Uh so thank you so much for your time both of you and we obviously as always you know really appreciate your presence at our online events. Uh as for as as for the folks this also brings us to the end of day one of u of of prepathon. I mean this this has been one of the best day ones of the prepathon since we have been doing it and and because of obviously the guest speakers that we had and the and the topics that we covered. I mean if you look at from from the start we had uh VP marketing of cloudways we had uh we we had K from one to two plugins and then and then we had this panel discussion from from folks from cloudways uh and then wrapping up with these two uh powerhouse panel discussions and then in the middle we had some fun activities as well which we sort of underestimated uh because we thought that they were very challenging but our awesome audience uh you guys nailed it and killed it in the comments. So, thank you so much for doing that. And obviously, one of the reasons why we always have amazing events, it’s because of you. It’s because of the audience that we get every year. Uh they’re always engaging. They’re always making sure that the comment section never die out. So, thank you so much for doing that. Uh and that sort of brings us to the close of day one. But that’s not it. We have two more days of action-packed sessions, panel discussions, presentations, and activities. So make sure to tune in tomorrow because tomorrow we’re going to be talking about Black Friday. A few of our sessions are covering that particular topic. So make sure that you tune in tomorrow. We’re going to be starting off with James Camp and Chris Badget. Uh that is an amazing panel discussion on Black Friday and then we will follow it up with Sonia Ael from side. So uh make sure that you tune in for that as well and then we will you know uh take the rest of the day for activities and and more panel discussions and presentations. So that’s pretty much it for day one folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for engaging in the comment section. We will see you tomorrow. Until then take care and bye-bye.