I'm excited to continue our series with Lauren Schiavone, founder of Wonder Consulting. In this second installment, we're digging deeper into practical applications of AI for marketing and retail media professionals. Building on our first discussion about AI literacy and organizational transformation yesterday, Lauren now shares actionable advice for those feeling overwhelmed by AI's rapid evolution.
From Anxiety to Action: First Steps with AI Tools
When I asked Lauren about baby steps for people still feeling overwhelmed, she immediately normalized these feelings. "If they're feeling overwhelmed, I just want to sort of note that it's totally normal and you're not alone. You might also feel anxious or excited about it," she explained. "Whatever you're feeling is totally okay."
Her first recommendation is refreshingly straightforward: master one large language model (LLM) tool, whether that's ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini—whatever is accessible in your workplace.
Lauren's litmus test for adoption made me laugh with its practicality: "Some folks are not paying for a tool like ChatGPT. And what that tells me is you are not using it enough. The first goal is you need to use ChatGPT or a similar tool enough that you have to pay for it."
I love that perspective. As I mentioned to Lauren, "I think there's a big difference between like paid advice and free advice. And when you're actually paying for it out of your own pocket and you're seeing that come up in your credit card statement, it's like paying for a gym membership. Well, I have to go to the gym now."
To build this habit, she suggests downloading the app on your phone and reaching for it instead of Google—a simple change that can accelerate your learning curve significantly.
Unlocking Visual Intelligence: Game-Changing for Retail
One of the most powerful capabilities Lauren highlighted for me is how today's AI tools can interpret images. This feature has profound implications for retail professionals:
"I remember the first time I realized, 'Oh my gosh, wait, it can understand images. Can it analyze the shelf?' And I tried it and it just sort of blew my mind," Lauren recalled. "How quickly it understood things like shelf principles or comparing different shelves."
For category managers or brand marketers, Lauren suggests taking photos of retail shelves and engaging in a simple but powerful exercise:
- "What are the benefits in the category?"
- "What are the claims in the category?"
- "What are the biggest brands in this category?"
(Check out Lauren's post on LinkedIn where she tested it with Procter & Gamble's Downy Unstoppables. She showed CahtGPT the product and asked how to use it. In seconds, it recognized the product and walked her through the instructions.)
Practical Workplace Applications
Beyond retail-specific uses, Lauren outlined several ways marketing professionals can leverage AI for everyday work challenges:
- Performance management: "Writing management reviews every year... or maybe you have to write a performance plan for someone, or maybe you have to have a difficult conversation with an employee and you don't really know how to have it. ChatGPT is a great personal coaching tool."
- Learning accelerator: "I love to use ChatGPT to help me understand things that I don't understand, like learning new ideas."
- Confidence builder: "It's also given me this newfound confidence that I think is particularly important for women... because I know that I can lean on ChatGPT to help walk me through it step by step and I can learn anything."
Staying Ahead: Understanding Retail AI Innovations
For retail media professionals specifically, Lauren described how she uses AI to stay current with innovations like Amazon's Rufus:
"I just had a lot of questions on like, what is it? How does it work? And there's a lot of information out there... like the IP that's out there, right? Like who can understand that?"
Her solution is to gather available information and feed it into ChatGPT with targeted questions:
- "Help me summarize this content."
- "What does this mean for me?"
- "How as a brand leader should I be thinking about this?"
- "Let's talk about how to win on Rufus. Can you help me create a scorecard?"
The AI-First Mindset
Lauren concluded with perhaps her most valuable advice: develop what she calls an AI-first mindset.
"Anytime you're working on anything, no matter what it is, you want to think to yourself, how might AI be able to help me, maybe make this better, maybe make this faster, maybe less confusing."
Her suggested prompt for discovering applications: "I work in X industry and I'm trying to do Y, how can ChatGPT help me streamline, enhance, or automate this process?"
Stay tuned for our next episode in this series, where we'll be exploring agentic AI and its implications for retail media professionals.
And if you missed our first conversation, you can find the blog version of it here.
