Anna Potapova: Managing AI Content at Scale for an Ecommerce Giant – Episode 33

Anna Potapova Generative AI creates new opportunities to create and manage content at scale. And scale is definitely required when crafting content experiences for one of the world's largest ecommerce companies. Anna Potapova is incorporating gen-AI across the span of her work at AliExpress: content creation and management, localization, personalization, and other areas where her strategic-content mind guides her. We talked about: her recent promotion to a new leadership role at AliExpress which types of content are most amenable to being generated by AI the standards they use to guide the creation and ensure the quality of AI content the crucial role of content designers and localization experts in the ongoing iterative improvement of AI content at a large scale how AI enables the democratization of content creation the large percentage of user-generated content on the AliExpress platform how AI helps her team with personalization how gen-AI content helps them scale their marketing personalization efforts the importance of inviting yourself to machine learning and data science meetings to show the value you bring the value of case studies when communicating with internal stakeholders to show the value you can bring the importance of staying grounded in business objectives when developing relationships with your collaborators how a strategic approach to your work can help your org use AI most productively how the shift from hand-crafted content to AI content at scale manifests in content operations her plans to explore how AI can help evaluate content quality and conduct content audits the concept of hyper-localization, which addresses very specific regional and cultural differences the importance of proactively engaging with product and tech colleagues to ensure that standards-backed content powers AI products going forward Anna's bio Anna Potapova is Staff Content Strategist at AliExpress (part of Alibaba Global Digital Commerce group). She changed team positioning from pure localization to Content Design, built a style guide and a system to maintain it, established standards for AI generated content in multiple languages and improved business metrics while reducing production costs. Anna has been featured on several podcasts (Content Strategy Insights, Writers of Silicon Valley, Localization Leaders), joined UX Evenings @ Google and helped to build a content community in China. Connect with Anna online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: lkjsdf Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 33. When you create, manage, personalize, and localize content at scale for a global ecommerce giant like Alibaba, you need all of the automation help that you can get. In her role as a content strategy and design leader at AliExpress, Anna Potapova is harnessing the power of generative AI tools and techniques to address customers' individual preferences, to help third-party vendors create better content, and to streamline their internal content design operation. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 33 of the Content and AI podcast. I'm really delighted today to welcome to the show, Anna Potapova. Anna is a staff content strategist at Alibaba, the big e-commerce merchant in China. She works specifically for AliExpress. Welcome to the show, Anna. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Anna: Thanks, Larry. Happy to be here again. Should I mention that since the last appearance on your podcast, I was on Content Strategy Insights with Arnaud. Since my last appearance I was promoted, I attributed exclusively to your podcast. Thank you so much for having me again. Larry: That's too awesome. Thank you. Anna: Recently, I've been talking a lot about AI and my team has been doing a lot of work in this area. Last week I actually spoke in front of front the audience of over 200 people in Chinese about how my team is harnessing the power of AI as we need to generate a lot of content every day. Larry: Nice. And you as one of the biggest commerce, maybe the biggest on the planet, I mean, there's a lot of content. Every one of those products needs something said about it. And every correspondence you have, there's so much going on there. And a lot of it I'm imagining is either routine or data-driven or in some way amenable to the use of AI. Can you talk just a little bit at a high level about how you're using AI? And also, I just want to note for folks that all of these conversations, we're going to dance around anything remotely proprietary. We're just going to talk in general about how big enterprises can work with big, vast content repositories and how AI can help. Can you talk a little bit about how you use AI to generate content? Anna: Well, first of all, it all comes down to what types of content can really be, dare I say, outsourced, can be created with AI because not every piece of content is created equal. Something very important for your product, maybe your core flaw, your gold path, all the UX copy over there. You really want it to be based on empathetic research, based on your users, based on very holistic view of this flow and challenges that people might potentially face. For things like that, I think it's very clear that you will still need that human touch. Anna: And recently, I think what I'm really excited about is that I see my company finding good niches, finding good places where AI can really benefit both business and users. We're diving into different content types and we're exploring new opportunities to see how we can create more personalized content, more engaging content where it's appropriate, where we know that it's not going to fail us and it's not going to harm the brand in any way. Anna: That ties back to quality centers. Of course, you cannot just have a large language model writing everything for you and having it all shipped without any quality control or any kind of involvement from professionals. Yeah. We've been building the system where we learn and try AI-generated content in different areas. And at the same time, we're building standards to make sure that it meets expectations to our customers. It doesn't contain any inaccurate or false information that it's surely aligns with our brand overall. Larry: Nice. And you've said that there's so much involved in it. And so it seems like developing standards is the prerequisite. You're like, "Okay, here's the threshold we have to meet in order to share this content." Can you talk a little bit about how... You mentioned some of the criteria that it's got to abide by the voice and tone of the organization, be accurate, all those things. Are there parts of that that AI can support enforcing your standards, I guess? Anna: Yeah, absolutely. But in that case, again, it requires more input from content designers and maybe even multilingual content designers as we work with many different countries and different cultures. It's important that you included your content professionals in the whole process of prompt design, scripts. And make sure that you really use the expertise of people to make sure that we can constantly build up, we can constantly build up, and we can improve from iteration to iteration. Larry: Yeah. And I can only imagine the scale of localization that you must do because you're a global company. You serve pretty much every country on the planet. Or do you constrain that in any way? Are you down to 50 or 100 languages? Anna: We serve over 200 countries and regions currently in 16 languages. Larry: Holy cow. And so that, again, that's one of those things like machine translation is probably one of the oldest forms of, if not AI, at least automation in content. But can AI help with that improving those machine translations and just making the localization person's job easier? Anna: Fantastic question. Fantastic question. I think what we're talking about here is localization in scale. When you have, for example, multiple merchants on a shopping platform, or maybe you have multiple hosts on your apartment sharing platform, you need to make sure that the content that those customers publish on the platform is actually attractive and actually interesting to people who are going to use the services or shop with those merchants. Anna: It's very important to empower people to create better content with AI, as long as you have this clear standard and you can make sure that your AI generates quality stuff. Patrick Stanford had this very good presentation recently on content design 3.0, talking about the impact of AI on the content design overall. And one of the principles that he brought up that really resonated with me is the democratization of content creation. That more people will have access to the tools to create content. And if we can guide them, if we can provide them with tools that generate better content that is better for their customers, better for their business, then it's really a win-win situation. That's also one of the areas where we've been working on in order to improve the information that comes from AliExpress sellers. Larry: That makes me wonder, what percentage of the business that you all do is third-party merchants who are doing that kind of thing? Like people who maybe don't have professional copywriters or just who content design is not their forte versus how much of it's AliExpress. It must be a huge amount of third-party sellers on your platform. Anna: Yes, yes, absolutely. I think on the daily basis, most of the content that people browse on our platform or any kind of platform I believe is coming from those merchants. Yeah. Most of the things that they see are not coming from my team. What my team creates is just a very small chunk, very small chunk,