The More We Use Artificial Intelligence at SpaRetailer, the More We Appreciate the Value of Human Knowledge and Authenticity

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, and if you’re like me, you are trying to figure out how to leverage it in your business. We talk about that on Page 40, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to tell you how we are using it here at SpaRetailer. 

We are a very small team, so efficiency has always been of the utmost importance. One of the things I really enjoy about being a business owner is creating and improving systems. But AI has enabled me to tackle long-standing pain points in our company that I assumed we’d need to hire someone to help us fix. 

For example, across SpaRetailer and PoolPro, we’ve done hundreds of photoshoots and have 10,000+ images from those alone — which doesn’t include all the pictures submitted to us by brands over the years. As technology has improved, we’ve struggled to organize and leverage those incredible assets into a searchable database. Finding an evergreen image of someone working on a hot tub with the panel off when we need it has been dependent on my memory (which for some reason is not improving over time). But using Codex, the programming arm of ChatGPT, I was able to build an semi-automatic process that not only tags incoming photos but also went back through our archive and tagged past images. We still have a long way to go, but we’ve finally made progress on a project we’ve struggled with for years.

But as we’ve explored using AI, we’ve also found weaknesses. For instance, I used it to help research the history of swim spas. While it was good at finding documents showing when companies ceased operation, digging up decades-old patents and keeping track of all the information I’d gathered over weeks of research, turns out the best online source for swim spa history was SpaRetailer.com. Beyond that, I needed to talk to the people who were there and then use AI to help confirm the dates and details they shared. Even then, oftentimes the information it passed off as fact was wrong. Fortunately, my many years in the industry made the falsehoods easy to spot. 

In a world of AI content, one thing you can always count on from SpaRetailer is that we actually talk to the people quoted in our articles. The pictures we print are real, and if they aren’t, we’ll tell you (we did have AI create an image of a raccoon turning on a hose for PoolPro). When we talk about today’s hot tub buyer, this is an important point. It’s getting harder and harder to trust what we see and hear online. And while there are so many positives AI can bring to our businesses, customers need and want authenticity. Once you lose their trust and put out “AI slop,” as my kids call it, it can be hard to walk that back and be taken seriously as the expert again.

So, like us, proceed with caution. See how you can stretch yourself and your teams with artificial intelligence. But don’t lose sight of who you are and what got you here in the first place.

Best,

Megan Kendrick, publisher

megan@kendrickcontent.com

P.S. AI wrote this headline. I hate writing headlines and I’m bad at it.