[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
[Voiceover]: Today's checkout features Abby Vora, CEO and founder of the AI platform Ocular. Founded in New Zealand in 2019, when Ocular helps retailers by taking images of products and automatically generating product tags that can be used in categorization, filters and sorting, SEO and personalization. They're even working towards creating automated product descriptions. Already they have leading retailers including Blue Bungalow, Maya and Princess Polly using their AI solution.
Nathan Bush: Abby, welcome to the checkout. We've obviously learned a lot about Ocular and what you and the team are doing in machine learning and product details and data. We're here to learn a little bit more about you. Five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Abhishek Vohra: This was a face cream made of sand or something which I bought my wife. Which three throughout, I think within 30 seconds of me getting it for.
Nathan Bush: Did you know it was made of sand? No.
Abhishek Vohra: I was like, who makes a face cream on the sand? I never even thought about that. So clearly that business went.
Nathan Bush: You missed some brownie points there.
Abhishek Vohra: Exactly.
Nathan Bush: All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Abhishek Vohra: I would say Nike. Nike is unbelievably good at what they do. How they have been able to build a brand right from beginning to now.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. How do you write their product data?
Abhishek Vohra: They are pretty good. They are pretty good. Definitely. They're exceptional. It's a runaway success.
Nathan Bush: All right, number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Abhishek Vohra: Well, we can make it history by, you know, automating their catalog enrichment process.
Nathan Bush: So lazy product data.
Abhishek Vohra: Yeah, lazy product data. I mean, it's just not. I think users are not willing to accept it anymore. So I think they want to get a good service. To get good customer experience, you need good underlying information.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and I liked what you were referring to before in the main episode where it's absolutely right to be customer focused and customer centric, but it doesn't mean that you can ignore product because in the end, customers are there to find the product that's right for them, so.
Abhishek Vohra: Exactly. And by building on the product information and catalog, you'll actually be able to come up with better ways to serve the customer by giving them better access to products, etc.
Nathan Bush: All right, number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Abhishek Vohra: Well, obviously they're already on on your one. I'm sure everyone says that, but. But also a podcast which I enjoyed is. It's called Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman, was the founder of LinkedIn and he's a partner at Greylock Ventures as well. So I think they really, really talk about how to. How to do things for scale. And that doesn't mean that you need to raise a lot of money on day one, but how to start thinking of that? They get some really good points. Speakers who get very granular about how they built their business, in some cases without taking any venture funding, and in some cases with all the mistakes they made, which can be learned from. But that's a really good podcast.
Nathan Bush: Great podcast and exceptional production quality as well. I love how they tell the stories. And all of a sudden you're like, you're in the hole in this story and you're like, oh, didn't even realize I was interested in this.
Abhishek Vohra: Yes.
Nathan Bush: All right, last one I have for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is bright. Love it. I love an optimistic outlook.
Abhishek Vohra: Yes.
Nathan Bush: What are you most excited about?
Abhishek Vohra: I think definitely now that Covid is sort of behind us, I think there is a lot more energy in people wanting to engage and get things done, which everyone feels is sort of lost out. Two years on just trying to survive and stay still. And there's a lot of that as well. But right now, I think people are just energized to say, okay, what's next? How do we take this forward? How do we capitalize on the opportunity that we have come through the dark side sort of a thing. So I think that gives me a lot of sort of optimism to be in retail and working with retailers.
Nathan Bush: Absolutely agree. The future is very bright.
[Voiceover]: Abby, thank you so much for joining
Nathan Bush: us on the checkout today.
Abhishek Vohra: Perfect. Thanks, mate. I appreciate it. Thanks, Nathan.
[Voiceover]: To hear more from Abby, jump back into episode 196, where Abby shares the nuts and the bolts of how ocular generates those product attributes. He also gives examples of how retailers are using the ocular data and explores the way AI will be able to speak. Speed up some of those pesky manual tasks that we in E. Commerce dread. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
