The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Shopify POS PRO Guide - I put together a guide to Shopify’s new POS Pro, highlighting its key features and how you can use it in brick-and-mortar locations, at pop-up events, and more.

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: The AI Wars between Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

• The D2Z Podcast: Nothing this week! Too much travel.

  Respond to this email if you’d like to come on the show potentially or if you have someone in your network that you think might be a good guest!

• App Update: Shopify Customer Accounts get Extensibility added.

• Upcoming Events: I’m in Miami the rest of the year except for Chicago 12/12-12/16, let me know if you want to connect!

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Let’s Chat D2C - Shopify POS PRO Guide

Omnichannel selling is table stakes, but it’s complicated to get it right. Shopify gives you one source of truth to manage your people, products, payments, orders, and analytics across your online storefront, POS, social channels, online marketplaces, and more.

I put together a guide to Shopify’s new POS Pro, highlighting its key features and how you can use it in brick-and-mortar locations, at pop-up events, and more.

What I’m Thinking About This Week - AI Wars: Amazon (Q), Google (Gemini <> Bard), Microsoft/OpenAI (GPT-4)

Google’s Gemini Model

Google debuted Gemini, its generative AI model that powers the Bard chatbot and challenges Microsoft-backed Open AI’s GPT-4. Google built Gemini, taking into account text, audio, video, images, and code instead of stringing all of these separate models together into one. Google claims that because of this, its generative AI model can better understand multimodal data, thereby producing better results compared to others.

Gemini will be released into other Google products, including generative search, ads, and Chrome, in the coming months.

Google vs Microsoft/OpenAI

From a commercial standpoint, GPT-4 is no longer unique, and that’s an alarming problem for Microsoft/OpenAI, especially after the Sam Altman drama, with many customers seeking backup plans.

Have LLMs reached a plateau?

Gemini didn’t blow away GPT-4, so are LLMs close to reaching a plateau?

Amazon Playing Catch-up and Ultimately Missteps

Amazon released its Q chatbot, a generative AI solution that drafts emails, summarizes reports, plans workshops, and develops business ideas.  Amazon claims its chatbot is differentiated based on the fact it has been trained on 17 years of AWS data, but all in all, the service is similar to what Microsoft and Google offer with their generative AI products. Amazon also released an upgraded AI chip, the Trainium2, which offers training four times faster than the first-generation Trainium.

However, less than a week after its launch, Amazon Q is already under heavy scrutiny as leaked documents show it is grappling with inaccuracies and privacy issues, including hallucinations and data leaks. It’ll be a hard process for them to tell whether the data is the issue, the algorithm, or both!

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

Nothing this week! Too much travel.

Respond to this email if you’d like to come on the show potentially or if you have someone in your network that you think might be a good guest!

App Updates & Highlights - Shopify Customer Accounts Extensibility + Gorgias Chat Campaigns

Shopify Customer Accounts Extensibility

Customer accounts are getting a major facelift! Shopify is launching extensibility to new customer accounts, allowing partners to build extensions directly into new customer accounts, including:

• Extending existing pages by building directly into the order index, order status, and customer profile pages.

• Adding highly visible order actions allows customers to take action on their orders throughout the post-purchase journey easily.

• Building full-page extensions.

The brand settings will be automatically inherited from the brand settings API, so your extensions will be visually consistent!

I’m super excited about all of the customization options this opens for customer accounts. It will enable us to continue to develop our client’s customer account pages to be the one-stop shop for all content, loyalty information, ordering history, etc. for customers.

Upcoming Events

I’m in Miami the rest of the year except for Chicago 12/12-12/16. Let me know if you want to connect!

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