Sarah Assous is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Akeneo, where she drives strategic messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategies. A results-driven leader, she has played a key role in accelerating company growth and leveraging marketing to support revenue generation. With expertise in content strategy, customer engagement, and competitive positioning, she combines creativity and business acumen to deliver world-class product experiences.
Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company and global leader in Product Information Management (PIM). Leading brands, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, including Chico’s, CarParts.com, TaylorMade Golf, Rail Europe, and more utilize Akeneo’s intelligent Product Cloud, app marketplace, and partner network to create elevated product experiences through product data enrichment, syndication, and supplier data onboarding.
Akeneo is described because the “world’s first intelligent product cloud”—what sets it other than traditional PIM solutions?
While traditional PIM systems are effective for centralizing and managing product information, many solutions struggle to support complex omnichannel strategies, dynamic data, and integrations with other eCommerce or data platforms, meaning that the PIM just becomes one other data silo.
The product cloud, however, is a composable suite of technologies that supports the whole product record for each dynamic and static data across the whole product lifecycle; our flexible, scalable PIM solution is a vital aspect of the product cloud, nonetheless it’s just one part.
As a part of Akeneo Product Cloud, we also offer an AI-powered supplier data onboarding solution, a syndication platform with the flexibility to activate product information across global marketplaces, a secure product portal that permits all stakeholders to access digital product catalogs on demand, and an intensive network of 150+ integrations. All of those solutions work together to be sure that product data doesn’t live in a siloed solution, but is optimized, enriched, and activated across every stage of the product lifecycle, which enables businesses to create optimal omnichannel product experiences, drive higher conversion rates, and improve customer loyalty.
How is AI transforming product information management (PIM) beyond just centralizing data?
Beyond data centralization, AI is a robust tool in the case of PIM because it brings advanced technology to an industry that has previously relied on outdated and inefficient tools. Except for centralized data, we’re seeing AI getting used in a large capability inside PIM solutions, including:
- Cleansing and enriching product data, including de-duplication and data extraction
- Generating ready-to-edit content using the centralized data, ensuring product page alignment with brand voice
- Translating product content quickly and efficiently to deliver strong product experiences at scale in multiple languages
- Optimizing product discovery and search functionality by improving natural language processing and understanding user intent
Are you able to walk us through how Akeneo’s AI-powered Supplier Data Manager streamlines data collection and enrichment?
Akeneo’s Supplier Data Manager (SDM) is designed to streamline the gathering, management, and enrichment of supplier-provided product information and assets by offering a user-friendly portal where suppliers can upload product data and media files, that are then robotically mapped to the retailer’s and/or distributors data structure. Our system utilizes artificial intelligence to automate product classification, enrich attributes from descriptions and labels, and normalize data to make sure consistency and accuracy, all of which reduces manual effort, accelerates time-to-market, and enhances collaboration between retailers and suppliers by providing a centralized platform for efficient communication and data exchange. Consequently, brands and/or manufacturers are arrange for omnichannel success by having consistent supplier insights across systems.
What role does AI play in ensuring product data accuracy and consistency across multiple channels?
One of the practical use cases of AI today is its ability to automate data standardization, enrichment, and validation processes to make sure accuracy and consistency across multiple channels. AI-powered algorithms can detect and proper inconsistencies, fill in missing attributes, and classify products based on predefined rules or learned patterns, reducing manual errors and ensuring uniformity across marketplaces, eCommerce platforms, print catalogs, and anywhere else you sell. Plus, natural language processing (NLP) and AI-driven search capabilities help businesses higher understand user intent, enabling them to optimize product descriptions and attributes to match how customers actually search. By analyzing search queries, AI can suggest more relevant keywords, improve product tagging, and dynamically refine search results, ensuring customers find essentially the most accurate and compelling product information, ultimately resulting in higher engagement, conversions, and reduced returns.
What are the largest challenges in implementing AI in product experience management, and the way is Akeneo addressing them?
AI relies on high-quality, structured data to generate meaningful insights, but many businesses struggle with fragmented or incomplete product information. Scalability is one other challenge, as AI models must repeatedly learn and adapt to latest product data, customer behaviors, and market trends while maintaining accuracy and relevance. Akeneo’s Product Cloud solution has PIM, syndication, and supplier data manager capabilities, which allows retailers to have all their product data in a single spot. We also leverage AI to enhance data quality and consistency, ensuring that the knowledge fed into AI solutions is complete, accurate, and reliable, which may alleviate the issue of getting inconsistent data across multiple platforms and taking weight off the retailer under more manual processes.
With the rise of AI-generated content, how does Akeneo ensure brand voice and authenticity remain intact?
While AI-generated content might be incredibly useful, especially inside search functionality and product descriptors, it’s necessary to take care of a robust sense of name identity when using these tools. Akeneo ensures that regardless of what kind of content we use AI to assist develop, that there’s at all times a human on the opposite side to take care of brand authenticity. When using AI-generated content, we truly depend on it as a place to begin to leap off of. With the ability to enhance and weave in brand messaging throughout the content allows the tone to stay consistent across channels and provides the marketing team time to give attention to strategic content.
What AI-driven personalization strategies can brands implement to reinforce customer experiences?
While personalization is nothing latest to brands, AI and ML technology allows brands to enter latest levels of customer personalization to satisfy the high consumer expectations. Knowing the quantity of knowledge that AI tools can process, this power opens the door to enable unprecedented levels of personalization during customer interactions through data evaluation. Leveraging customer data in this fashion allows AI algorithms to make broader connections across customer order history, preferences, etc., to create those tailored product recommendations. AI-powered search and natural language processing also can refine search results by improving user intent interpretation, improving discoverability and reducing friction within the buying journey. Nevertheless it’s necessary to do not forget that and not using a number of AI strategies and and not using a strong foundation of knowledge to coach and support the AI solutions, personalizing customer experiences with this technology is next to unimaginable.
How does Akeneo optimize product discovery and search functionality using AI?
A great product search and discovery experience relies on products being accurately tagged, categorized, and syndicated to the correct channels. That’s why we offer native AI capabilities built inside Akeneo PIM that enable enriched product data by analyzing existing information to fill in missing attributes, ensuring comprehensive and accurate product listings. Akeneo SDM also offers AI capabilities to be sure that supplier data is complete, correct, and formatted accurately. And if that wasn’t enough, we also offer 20+ AI applications inside our extensive App Store that cover a wide selection of AI use cases, a few of that are custom built for Akeneo. These features help to be sure that the correct information is provided to the correct customers at the correct time.
What are essentially the most common bottlenecks in managing product data at an enterprise level, and the way does Akeneo solve them?
Although technological advancements in product data are vast, many organizations are still battling manual product information management. Some major challenges we see enterprises facing include managing product information in multiple languages and markets, creating consistent and interesting product descriptions at scale, maintaining accuracy while reducing time-to-market, and coordinating between technical, marketing and sales teams. These challenges make them unable to maintain up with the pace of today’s digital commerce expectations.
With Akeneo, these challenges are largely eliminated. With strong AI features, Akeneo is capable of robotically implement rules for language content translation, in addition to using intelligent content generation to permit technical specifications to be transformed into thoughtful summaries, and interesting marketing narratives. It’s key to notice that intelligent content doesn’t eliminate marketing teams, but enables them to thrive with a place to begin to personalize AI-generated content to suit their brand in one of the simplest ways possible.
Where do you see the role of AI in product experience management evolving over the subsequent five years, and the way is Akeneo positioning itself to remain ahead of those changes?
It’s hard to predict five years from now knowing how the evolution of AI is shifting on a regular basis. Nonetheless, with the introduction of tools like Google’s Perplexity, we will expect to see the emergence of AI shopping agents come to life, where shoppers can research, browse, compare, and buy products multi function place. As AI and NLP evolve to higher understand and interpret customer intent, these personalized search experiences will begin to grow in popularity and live alongside traditional search experiences.
While it might be hard to predict the longer term, we do know one thing: AI solutions will at all times fall short in the event that they aren’t supported by a robust foundation of up-to-date, reliable, and complete product information. The outputs created are only pretty much as good as the info provided, so wherever the evolution of this technology is headed, step one to success will at all times be creating that single source of truth for product data, which is where Akeneo can assist.
