Moeez: And we are back folks for the last session of day one of Prepathon. What a day this has been. We have had so many insightful sessions, panel discussions, activities, which has sort of brought us to this last session of the day, and this is equally exciting because we are discussing AI, we are discussing again e-commerce myths, what’s working in AI, what’s working in marketing, and also because we have two amazing guest speakers with us today. Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor. Miriam, if I can have you on stage really quickly, thank you so much Miriam for being here. And then joining her is Vito Peleg from Atarim. He’s the founder of Atarim. So, thank you so much, Vito, for being here as well.

It’s a pleasure to have you both again for Prepathon, and I’m sort of having this feeling that we are getting used to this arrangement of having you both at our online events. How are you feeling about this Prepathon and the online event? Please go ahead Miriam.

Miriam Schwab: Okay. We still don’t have that down pat. I mean it’s an amazing event. It feels like each time you guys do it, it gets better, higher quality, more polish. So from that perspective, kudos, and you’re bringing really great content to the viewers and the audience that’s tuning in, that is really actionable, they can use in their day-to-day, which I think is amazing value. So also great job on that.

Vito Peleg: That’s awesome. I love how it’s broken down into these topics. So every few weeks or a couple of months we have something new to dive into. I love that.

Moeez: Yeah. Awesome. So without any further ado, let’s get straight into the questions for this session. So Miriam and Vito, this session is around e-commerce strategy check. And the reason why we wanted you to take up this topic is because we are going to be talking a lot about AI in this session, and since you both have been working so much and your products have been working so much around AI and building products and bringing it in front of the customers where they solve real AI problems, which brings me to my first question of this session. There’s so much noise around AI in e-commerce. When it comes to being a page builder or any collaboration tool, there’s so much happening in AI when it comes specifically to e-commerce. From your experience, what is actually delivering results right now and what is just the hype? Vito, if you want to start us off with that.

Vito Peleg: Sure. So I think that the way to generate results, and that’s with AI but with any other tools in the e-commerce space, is do not one thing, and that’s usually not the easy answer, but that’s usually the case, where it’s a combination of a few different elements that bring that kind of impact to the table. And you mentioned the usefulness of some of those creation tools, the design tools, and we saw that audit that just happened before we joined in on the previous session there, also from the collaboration perspective, that’s a crucial part to be able to execute at the speed and all those kind of things.

So, if we’re looking at it from a perspective of where does this sit, everything contributes in its own way. But the way that I would try to look at this is first of all trying to understand what are the things that we have done as humans over the past few years inside e-commerce and try to find the tools that will give us the better lift into the things that we’ve already been doing. So rather than the completely new things that are out there, how can we be more effective with the things we already know that worked? And there’s many examples of this in the AI space. Not so much the out of the box completely brand new type of marketing, but mostly just things that are tried and true, but only faster, quicker, more effective.

Moeez: Miriam, would you like to weigh in? Agree or disagree with Vito?

Miriam Schwab: I agree with Vito. I definitely think that what we’re seeing with AI is that the things that we’ve all been doing, the activities that we’ve been trying to execute on where we’re just people or more people or even bigger teams, there’s a limit to what we can do and how far we can scale things. There’s 24 hours in the day. We have to sleep, we get sick, our kids get sick, whatever. And so it makes us all less available. Whereas when AI comes into the picture, it allows us to almost infinitely scale the activities that we should be doing anyway. We just can’t. I think people can feel bad about what they aren’t doing. But in the end, we can’t work more than 24 hours a day and we should not be working 24 hours a day because we have to sleep.

So with AI we can do things faster, more efficiently and in many ways better. For example, bulk activities. So, if you’re managing an e-commerce site and you need to modify a whole line of products and change them, let’s say now you would either need a developer to run scripts for you, which is expensive, creates blocks and things like that. Or now with AI, you can upload things and have those types of repetitive tasks happen automatically. An example of that is Elementor’s new agentic AI tool called Angie, which is in early access, which integrates with WooCommerce and allows these types of bulk actions in a really cool way. It actually allows you to do things that let’s say in the past would take you an hour to set up, and you have the capabilities to set it up, but now you could just tell the AI to do it for you and within 10 minutes you’re done. So those types of things I think are going to give online sellers of various kinds way more opportunity to maximize the potential of their business.

Moeez: Awesome. Let’s talk about things that have been part of AI for quite a while. So chatbots, product recommendations, these are some of the things that we have been seeing over the last couple of years or so. Where have you seen AI make the most direct impact on sales or retention? Miriam, if you want to.

Miriam Schwab: So, chatbots can be great and they can also be terrible. And I think we’re not quite yet at the place where you can depend on an AI chatbot to support your either previous buyers or future buyers and give them the quality experience that they need and deserve, and that will also bring you the seller results. If you want your chatbot to work well for you, you have to spend a ton of time investing in it, tweaking it, and configuring it so that it works for you. But even then, I think we still need humans to be around in order to keep that human touch and a real touch in the picture. I think we will get there where chatbots will be able to take over more of the time that we spend on supporting our customers.

But even then I would just warn all of us that we should not fully remove the human experience, in almost every case of everything that we are selling, whether it’s services, digital products like Elementor’s products, or physical products. If you’re selling anything through a store, people are engaging with your brand, with who you are, with what your vision is, what your messaging is, and why you’re selling what you’re selling. Yes, there’s a lot of transactions that happen just because they’re cheaper and whatever, but in many cases it matters and will continue to matter because in the end the buyers, the sellers are people. So the chatbots are good, they can save some time, but I would just suggest that we all keep an eye on it for the foreseeable future so that we still deliver, pay attention to our customers, and get the results that we want.

Vito Peleg: I would like to strengthen exactly what Miriam is saying here. I think that the question was specifically around where do we see the most impact of AI in sales and or retention, and I think that it came to a place where it is where you sometimes don’t implement it and where you strategically decide to put a human in the loop, as we call it now, to use the AI on behalf of this communication type of element. So if we’re talking about this from a chat perspective, and I give an example, we just had this discussion in our support literally this week where someone came in and suggested, you know we have this feature, how about we do it now, because we’ve already known about this for a long time but they kind of resurfaced it. How about we just turn on the chatbot and we can save talking to about 60 people a day. That was the stat that came up there.

But most of the stuff that come into our support are kind of positive. Their questions of how to use the product, not so much of like, they’re all people that just want to engage with the product. And so because we don’t have mass scale of support, I think that we can allow ourselves to actually have these conversations and have a human jumping in in under 90 seconds and delight the person that is on the other side. But from a revenue perspective, we also consider this for other two opportunities. How can we leverage this quick question that the user may have had about one of the features that we have and leverage this into a positive review or into an upsell of the product itself.

So while our team has access to an AI that is trained on the product so that they can surface the answers and vet if the answers are correct as well before shipping this to the customer, they use AI to reformat some of their messages, to check that the way that it’s written is in line with the kind of the voice that we have. The human is still there operating it and having a real conversation with the user that is on the other side in real time. So, I think that that’s where we see the most value in it. And I would even suggest that for most folks, especially when you’re talking about e-commerce, in the early days, unless you were like Asos or Amazon or something like this, but especially in the early days, having and building those relationships with the clients, that’s what gets you those recurring purchases. And that is very hard to replicate with AI still. There’s a few that are now talking about this. There’s a campaign here in London in all the tube about this, my friend, the AI friend that you can hang out with. So maybe it’s going into this direction, but for now I think that the human experience definitely prevails, especially if we’re trying to build a brand.

Moeez: Oh, think you’re muted. Yeah. Sorry. Let’s now divert from AI and talk about marketing channels. In your experience and in your view, what do you think are the marketing channels that are still pulling their weight this year in 2025 and which of the channels have started to decline a bit as of now? Vito, you want to get us going?

Vito Peleg: So whenever I think about this kind of perspective, I try to zoom out a little bit and I’m looking at this from, there’s an interesting concept of the audience, message, channel, and system. And those four components together bring you that winning channel. But the channel on its own is only one of the four that you need to unlock. So who are we targeting? Who is the audience that we’re trying to approach? That would tell you usually where do they hang out, which is where you would want to be seen. And so, again, if we’re considering this specifically from an e-commerce perspective, and in those early days of trying to build that brand, niching down is always a smart move, and I’m sure that this is something that came up in a lot of the conversations as well today.

But the point of this is that once you have that niche that you’re serving, it’s a lot easier to figure out where do these people hang out and make that the channel that is probably going to be the most effective for you. And I’ll give an example. We work with a lot of e-commerce brands. So, I show up and join this amazing event to talk a little bit and to share knowledge, and that wouldn’t be as effective if I would just do it on even a broader scale of a TED talk or something like this, or put ads on the YouTube underground, because it’s so broad that I would probably waste a lot of the resources, a lot of the eyeballs that I’m trying to get in touch with are just not focused enough. And so that audience, message, channel, and system perspective kind of gives you that rounded up approach to figuring out where is that channel that you want to be seen, because it definitely differs for each one of us.

Miriam Schwab: I’m going to go really dumb, but in so many cases, dumb works. And one of the most effective channels to this day, even though it’s so old school and like from the dawn of the internet, is email. It just still is. It’s crazy. We’re all so modern and technology is taking us forward and there’s a billion different ways we can communicate with our users, but in the end, email has such a great, it targets the user, they see it. I mean, obviously not 100%, but the rates are high, they click through, they convert. Like, if you have a high quality email list with segments and making sure that you’re targeting the different segments, recognizing who they are, then it just works really well. With AI in the picture and being able to personalize that even further, then it just becomes even more powerful. So crazily that’s still maybe one of the best mediums for marketing.

And then the other one which is also old school and still matters even in this age of AI is SEO and content marketing. It just keeps doing its thing, and now with LLMs eating up that content, so on the one hand we’re in this struggle of, well LLMs are just eating up our content and so then they don’t have to send users to your site, but depending on how, it’s still there’s still a connection between how you’re ranking in SEO and how you’re appearing in AI output, and that will still generate brand awareness and engagement even if it’s not on your site, and eventually people come to your site when they want more information, and that continues to be the case. So we still got the old school stuff, and then of course there’s paid marketing which is still, if done well, works well. So, not that exciting. It’s the same old same old stuff.

Moeez: All right. And that was literally the question, what’s working and what’s not working. So, a lot of people have this impression that now that we are with AI, a lot of things that used to work before might not work in the same manner. But as Miriam said, SEO and content marketing still works and it still produces results. So that is one thing that we can take away from here. Before I move on to my next question, I just want to remind everyone in the comment section that they can ask their questions from Vito and Miriam and we will dive into the comment section in the middle of the session to take those questions and take answers from Miriam and Vito.

So moving on to my next question. I want to address this towards the smaller e-commerce stores. The larger stores, they might already have implemented AI or different marketing channels and they might already be starting to see results from it. But the smaller brands, the smaller e-commerce stores who are just coming up, they often have this challenge of applying quality data for AI and automation. So how should smaller e-commerce brands approach data quality for AI and automation?

Vito Peleg: So maybe I can share a little bit as to how we’re approaching this internally as well. And that has two sides to it. One is when it comes to raw data that needs to be collected by the AI or processed by the AI. That’s one component. Maybe Miriam, I think that Angie is exactly that type of thing that allows you to surface this very easily inside WordPress. I’m trying to also look at this from a perspective of how do we tell that story throughout the entire experience. So as we’re dealing with e-commerce and there’s a bunch of products, for each one of them there is the descriptions that tell the story of the thing, the whole thing needs to be consistent, and especially as we’re then going into support, folks that need to understand what is available, what are the features, what are the options that are available for each one of the products that we may be serving.

For us as a software there is a lot of layers to it. And so one thing that I felt the need of doing, and that was very powerful, is I basically recorded seven hours of me going through the entire product from the top left icon and describing it in words for everything that I see, not only what but also the why, and what’s the use case and how this is set up, and went into every single button, every single feature, every single micro feature that is in there to describe it in as much detail as possible. That created about 400 pages of a transcript that was then fed into an AI that basically knows the platform. And so I did that once and now every team member in the organization, every customer that wants to know some of those things, we have this as a public custom GPT as well for people to go in and talk to, learn and know what is going on inside the product inside and out as much as the person that thought about it. And that removes a lot of the barriers that a lot of companies have, especially as you’re starting to have different folks that are managing on there. So explain it in your own words, transcribe the whole thing, and then you already have a huge asset that can not only tell the story properly but knows the why, and that is a lot of times where things fall.

Miriam Schwab: It’s very cool. So I would say for smaller brands where the resources are more limited, then it’s important to focus on not too many sources of analytics. Analytics are critical for whatever it is that you’re doing because if you can’t see what’s happening for real, then you can’t take action to fix things, make things better, or identify issues. You should always be keeping an eye on your analytics in case there’s some kind of issue that’s happening with your e-commerce site that you’re just not aware of. I would say not to try to have too many analytic sources where it can be hard to track it and bring them together when you’re a smaller brand.

But invest in making sure that those analytics, let’s say it’s some kind of analytics on your site and your email analytics, and dream of a day, which I think it already exists to some extent, but I don’t know about tools that can do this automatically, and I think the analytics tools will start to offer it more and more, where you can chat to your stats and say, what age is bringing in the highest quality sales? Like everyone who lands on this page, I’m a flower shop, this page about roses, may not end up buying roses, but they’ll buy a product that’s over $50. Okay, great. So, I want more of those types of pages. AI, what’s good about that page? Why is it working so well? And how can I optimize that page? At the moment, you can do that by exporting your analytics, feeding it into an LLM, this is what I know. And maybe there are tools that do it and then talking to the AI about it there. But it would be great if on an ongoing basis you could either ask for information or it could proactively offer you information like, fix this, fix that, do this, you have an opportunity to optimize the content here, create another page like that. I think it’ll be really cool to create that level of automation, higher quality data analytics that’s actionable for users. So, fortunately, I can’t tell people exactly how to do that now without exporting and importing to the LLM.

Vito Peleg: Well, you’re describing our tool. This is exactly what we’re doing. The Inner Circle.

Miriam Schwab: Oh, right. There you go. Someone is doing it. Stay tuned. That type of thing in general, and what you guys are doing in general will be amazing for smaller brands. Expanding their team. It’s what you’re doing.

Vito Peleg: Yeah, great. Exactly that. Really the perspective was to create that, or we call it the first agentic creative team. And very much like Angie, the Inner Circle is also now in early access and there’s a few thousand people that are playing around with this in the background. In the next few days, maybe a week, let’s see if the team will get it wrapped up, it’s going to be live already, but people can already access this if you go to atarim.io/early-access to have a look. And basically what it is, is it’s a team of agents that are each expert in their own field and they have access to those additional tools where they can fetch information like an SEO report or an accessibility report, and then they review the work based on your intent, whether this is to improve the conversion rate of this page or to improve the SEO or find any problems that may happen on this page before we launch this new landing page for Black Friday. So it basically does what we’ve been doing for many years, which is allowing for feedback, and so now feedback is not only human to human but now AI is providing the feedback. This is exactly where we’ve leaned into it.

Moeez: Awesome. Let’s talk about another buzzword that has been going on in the industry, and that is hyperpersonalization. A lot of e-commerce stores are implementing hyperpersonalization so that they can get the most out of their store, so that they can get the most sales, but at the same time there are data and privacy concerns and different regulations that are popping up in different regions of the world. So how do you think this hyperpersonalization concept is sustainable and what can e-commerce stores do as an alternative? If it’s not hyperpersonalization, then what else can they implement? Vito, if you can start us off with that.

Vito Peleg: So I think that the personalization up until now was more of a matter of personalizing it to the name of the person or the location of the person. And that was done because these were the available tools, let’s put privacy aside, that was the available tools for website builders or for marketers to be able to pull in geolocation, to try and fetch the name from all kinds of different places and things like that. Now we’re going into intent-based personalization, and so that is a completely different level in my mind, rather than saying, it’s nice that I can say, hey Moeez, it’s great that you’re visiting this page, I know that you live over there, maybe that will be relevant for you, that’s valuable, but what if it knows what you’re actually looking for and helps you surface that, so it in fact personalizes the experience completely for you.

And we even saw an experience like this by Claude. It’s like an experiment that they just launched, I think it was two days ago or something like this, where the website creates itself as you engage with it. And so that’s super experimental and it takes a while, and you click through and it takes time for it to generate. Literally every page is generated based on the steps that you’ve done during this session, based on the decisions that you’ve made during this session. So it is personalization that is based on your own personal intent rather than available data, or what we would now probably start considering as generic data, which is my name and my email and things like that. Now it literally can be tailored to me, and that’s mind-blowing if it will go into this direction.

Miriam Schwab: Someone here in the chat pointed out privacy. I think that’s the message here, about how privacy concerns are a real concern here, and I agree. I think e-commerce brands can personalize around the information they have gotten from their users first of all. So this comes back to, let’s say, email marketing or things like that, where let’s say you already have a history of purchases or history of usage of a user who’s logged in and has agreed to share their activity with you, has communicated with you about certain things so you understand their interests, maybe even during some kind of onboarding registration process you’ve gotten them to identify their interests, then from that point on you can personalize based on that, and of course going forward it can evolve with the user.

Then there’s the kind of not directly given information about a user, which is their behavior. So they’re not logged in, but you can kind of see, oh, they keep looking at this brand of shoes, right? Let’s help them see more of that or similar things to that. Like a lot of things, AI sometimes does things really well and sometimes does things really badly. So again, I’m not sure at this point how much we can depend on AI really understanding what a user wants and then helping them continue on that path to ideally a sale or some kind of success. But I do envision that we’ll get to a place where what you’re describing, Vito, these kinds of on-the-fly personalized experiences will start to happen for users.

Vito Peleg: I saw it today. Sorry.

Miriam Schwab: That’s okay.

Vito Peleg: I saw that when I was about to cancel a subscription to some service, and then it asked me the reason for it, and then it cited a bunch and then it wrote in real time, you could see the tokens coming in basically, and it gave me a personalized message why I should not cancel the subscription. I did still, but it was still cool to see this is something that is happening. But it didn’t end there. After that, I got a personalized email based on my usage, based on what it could find through augmentation tools about my business based on the domain or the email that was signed up, and basically gave me a story of why this would be the right thing for me to do, fully automated from the founder, within seconds after the churn happened.

Miriam Schwab: That’s very cool. Yeah, I do just want to also mention here the new instant commerce that OpenAI launched in conjunction with Shopify and Stripe. It’s a new protocol that will then be able to be rolled out to other platforms and other products, that I think is in some ways almost the ultimate form of personalization, which is that I tell OpenAI, at least at this point, they want to research buying new earphones and it asks me questions. It’s like a personal shopper and I tell it what I’m looking for and what my budget is and it gives me a bunch of options and then right there through OpenAI I can already make the purchase. It’s only available in the States at this point and only with certain products, but it will be interesting to see how that evolves and how much people want to engage with a shopping experience like that. But that is a personal shopper taking you to the product that’s ideally ideal for you.

Moeez: Yeah. That was very insightful. And this next question is very relevant to this particular event because we have people joining in from various parts of the world, various regions, different continents. And the question is, does every marketing strategy work the same way for every region, or are there region-based different marketing strategies that you have applied in your career so far that you could share some examples of how they were different and, most importantly, why they were different based on specific regions?

Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Okay. Sure. I feel like a few people in the chat asked about WhatsApp, and WhatsApp is a great example of it being regional. So, Americans don’t really use WhatsApp. Okay, now a bunch of Americans are going to chat and say, no, no, I use WhatsApp, but like they don’t, they use, I think, iMessage, iPhone. There’s an assumption that everyone has iPhones there or something. So, WhatsApp marketing would not be effective as much in the States. But in other parts of the world, especially parts of the world where the internet quality is not as high, WhatsApp is an amazing solution for marketing, because I think pretty much everyone has it at this point, it seems like. And it can be a really great way to communicate with your users. They’re living in WhatsApp anyways, and just getting messages to them that way can be great. So I think that’s just one example of how one platform can be great in particular regions and not great in others. Also taking into consideration bandwidth availability in certain regions and things like that is definitely something people need to keep in mind. Privacy, GDPR, you got to keep those things in mind especially in certain regions. So it definitely comes into play.

Vito Peleg: I think this comes back to that audience, message, channel, and system framework that I would apply to these type of decisions. Like you’re saying Miriam, the channel of using WhatsApp is relevant in some regions, there’s probably others that we should choose, but then I would also flag this in terms of the message itself. I have a friend that wanted to expand into India. They had a really successful business in the US and they thought that they would have a really interesting market in the Indian market. But they had no one from India in the team trying to approach that market. And so they sent a couple of people over there for a couple of days to kind of hang out and try to understand what they can learn. Booked a bunch of meetings. They came back and said, no, we just can’t do it. There’s no way that we can have enough context and information to market to a market that we’re not a part of.

And I think that if we’re thinking about this again from that niching down perspective, if we try to serve the people that we know, we’re much more likely to nail the message to those people if you are them. And so that’s definitely true for territories. And we’re even seeing this here, I’m based in the UK, and marketing to the US is different from marketing to the UK specifically. And the same thing in every region in Europe, they have their own mentality, their own way of doing business, their own pricing considerations, the things that move them into action or out of action. So it’s very much a matter of getting to know the niche that you’re serving and the audience that you’re serving. And I would just say generally it’s a good shot to go after the US and figure that one out, because it’s just a huge market with a lot of buying potential. So that really is what we’ve been doing. Instead of trying to win everyone, we’re trying to focus on one, but it’s still big enough to help us win.

Miriam Schwab: I just want to add to that. So from the localization perspective, people think that localizing your product for an area means translating and charging in their currency, but it’s so much more. It’s also cultural. What holidays do they have? Marketing around that and speaking about their lived experience. At Elementor, we decided that we’re going to start localizing in certain markets and we actually hired people in each market and we opened up offices there. We have in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain now. Not just localizing the content, it’s more than that, it’s the cultural. It’s showing up there. It’s being part of that lived experience. And then you can really speak to the people you’re selling to. This is where AI can actually help, combined with the human experience of translations, because wow, that’s a huge job and it’s ongoing. AI translation can be sloppy but with a human in the picture it can go way faster than it used to. So that’s a win actually.

Moeez: I love that. Awesome. I would like to now jump into the Q&A from our audience, and I see a question which is very relevant to today’s world and I think you both are the best person to answer that question. Let me pin it on screen. So they say that they’re quite concerned about the advancement of AI and its adverse effects on the skills of creatives. How do you think one can manage the situation without losing relevance in the creative world? I think a short brief answer from each one of you could be very helpful to this gentleman and then to anyone else who might have this concern. So, Vito, you want to go first?

Vito Peleg: Yeah. I think that it’s a matter of, we’re now no longer the creatives. We are now the orchestrators. And so if you have a team of, I think the best example that we’re even discussing internally, and it’s not only in creative it’s in every single role that is out there. If you’re doing a role that many people can do, which is pretty much any role out there, then it means that eventually through context engineering and prompt engineering and building agents that think sequentially, they can get to a similar result to what we’re doing. That’s just the reality. It’s not that one-shot AI that we’ve gotten used to over the past couple of years. It’s critical thinking over multiple steps, and that is what creates a level of skills that are required.

So I think that from this perspective, being the person that manages the fleet of the people that you have, you have an edge over that, but you got to make that transition. You got to have that realization that we’re essentially all becoming, in the traditional world, managers. In the modern world, we’re basically prompt engineers, context engineers, so that we can replace our job with the use of multiple AIs that are just going to do that at a much greater scale than we could have done previously. And so less exciting, less creative for sure, I’m a creative person at heart, and I think there’s going to be some place for it in art, but in business, I don’t think that that’s where it’s going to get to.

And I think that a good example for it is when the printing press got invented, then you didn’t need a bunch of people to actually write books with pens and ink. When photographs got invented, then you no longer needed the creative people that spent sometimes decades perfecting the realism of paint, and both of these have become art rather than the stuff that we produce or consume as in production. So I think that this is exactly what we’re going to see, and even in our e-commerce space we see that very often nowadays. I used to spend countless hours shaping a logo into a mockup of a bottle just to make sure in Photoshop that it sits just right with the shadows and all of those kind of things to create those mockups of products. And now it’s literally three seconds away in a prompt. I just upload the logo and I ask it to combine it. It’s literally two words and then you get what you took an hour to do not long ago. So I think that that part will still be effective from an art perspective if we want to practice that. But from a business perspective, think of yourself as a manager. That’s the next level of a creative if you really think about it, is that you have a team of creatives that you just direct. And this is really what AI gives each of us the ability to become today.

Miriam Schwab: Yeah. So I think it’s like another age of different types of evolutions that we’ve seen. Vito’s examples were very good, where tools are introduced that create greater efficiency around a particular area. In the case of AI, it’s like many areas, and allows people to take their input to a more strategic level. In the past, if you want to write a book, you sat and wrote it, that was a good example. And now you get the content out. That was the goal, to get the content out. It also shifts where the creative story happens. So in the case of books, for example, there’s still art around books. There’s art around digital books as well, right? Like even the layout of the page, the font, there’s a whole world of fonts. I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. I mean, Claude is so interesting because their whole identity is based on their font. I love it. You can totally see when someone’s been using Claude, right? Gorgeous. The creativity shifts to a different place where it’s still needed.

And also I think it’s just another example of the power of a tool depending on who wields it. We’ve had some really great tools already from the last decade or two that have given people more and more capabilities. Photoshop is an example of it. Figma, AI wasn’t in the picture, but there was always a difference between amazing, gorgeous, creative results and let’s say something that I tried to do, which would look fine and nice and good enough, but if I wanted something gorgeous, I would go to someone in our design team at Elementor and they would create something gorgeous. And it gives us all more capabilities. So now I can maybe create something gorgeous. Something that’s going to be mind-blowing is going to depend on how someone prompts it, their vision and how they manage to get that vision onto paper, so to speak, through AI. What I’m saying is creative capabilities and talent, I think, will always have a place. It’s just now the very creative people can do way more and faster, and the rest of us will become somewhat more creative and have more capabilities and not always have to depend on those super artists who aren’t always available. So it just gives us all more capabilities but creativity matters.

Moeez: Awesome. Miriam and Vito, we’re going above time as well because we are seeing some questions in the chat. So just wanted to take one more before we wrap up. So this question is around applications. With AI being marketed as a game changer in e-commerce, what’s actually driving ROI and which AI applications are still more experimental or nice to have? They’re asking your recommendation on how to sidestep the hype, how to judge if a particular AI application or tool is at the stage where it’s good to have, where if you don’t have it that won’t be an issue, but which tools are actually essential to have and how can you differentiate between the two?

Vito Peleg: So I would go to what we mentioned in the beginning, which was, think of the things you’re already doing, what does AI do now that you are actually doing as well manually, and start there. And so I’ll give an example. Something that we found very useful is having a subscription to OpenArt, which is like an AI tool that bundles all of the different image generation type of tools that are in there. You can have the images, you can have the videos, and we have our little characters in there, or even, there’s 40 images of me that were uploaded into a character, and then all of our thumbnails are created not only with AI, but the faces, the expressions, the features, the backgrounds are then created with AI, exported from there, taken to Canva for composition, for editing them together. But that for us was something that took a bunch of time for me, and you need to take those shocked pictures for the YouTube thumbnails. I never liked it. So now AI does it. I did it once and now AI does the rest, and that’s cool by me.

Same thing if we’re talking about this in e-com, that’s product images. There’s so much that you can do with just having beautiful product images to elevate the quality of your brand. And really it used to be a matter of inviting the photographer, going to the photographer’s studio and they had that little table with the white background and you’d put the product in there, you need to have the product physical, and then they would take photos, and then if it’s not that great, then you’re stuck. So now you have unlimited production abilities for all of these types of stuff. So that’s why I think OpenArt is a really useful tool as an example. But if we’re looking at, for each one of us it’s a little bit different. If you just look into your calendar, I track my day through the calendar, so if I look into the calendar I try to see what are the things that I did that I shouldn’t be doing, that I should find a way to automate through AI or through a Zapier type of tool. But that has been an exercise or mentality that I learned already a decade ago in the world of Pabbly, Make, Zapier, and it just became on steroids or superpowers now with the help of AI. So there’s a lot of opportunity but it’s really personal to each one of us. Find what you do and then Google, so go to ChatGPT and ask it what is the AI tool that does that so I don’t need to do that anymore ever again.

Miriam Schwab: I think we’re at the stage where there’s just a proliferation of tools and it’s overwhelming, and on the one hand you’re like, I want to try everything, but then you have FOMO because you can’t try everything. It reminds me of the old school days of the early open source web when there was a proliferation of PHP solutions, forums, blogs, etc. What happens is eventually things consolidate, things stop being maintained or certain things win, and then everything kind of settles and certain winners emerge. I’m at the stage where I’m trying to figure out what the winners are because I don’t have time to waste or invest in things that aren’t really going to give me what I need.

So what I’m seeing, just my perspective, I’m really impressed with Google’s tooling. It’s hard, they’re releasing so much that it’s actually hard to keep track of it, right? I would pay attention to that. Obviously, Nano Banana is one of their most well-known ones right now, but they have these gems that you can use. You can pretty easily create your own kind of mini apps there. I’m struggling with figuring out how to automate my work like what you’re describing, Vito. I haven’t solved that yet. AI hasn’t done the job well enough for me, and I’ve really tried and I’ve been pushing it and begging it, and it’s not so great. But I’m paying close attention. I would like to be replaced somewhat, I need more time. So I’m paying attention to Gemini. Also, what I really like about that, at least the potential of it, is that it ties into Google Workspace and so much of my life is there anyways. So I really want Gemini and Google Workspace to automate my life. Anyways, that’s where I’m trying to go with that, but I haven’t solved it yet. But we all just have to kind of test things where we can, pay attention to what seems to be winning and what seems to be really delivering consistently, and go from there.

Moeez: Awesome. And with that we are at the end of this panel discussion. I want to thank Vito and Miriam for being here at this year’s Prepathon and making it a successful event yet again. So thank you so much for your time both of you and we, as always, really appreciate your presence at our online events. As for the folks, this also brings us to the end of day one of Prepathon. This has been one of the best day ones of the Prepathon since we have been doing it, because of the guest speakers that we had and the topics that we covered. If you look from the start, we had the VP of marketing of Cloudways, we had Katie from Barn2 plugins, and then we had this panel discussion from folks from Cloudways, and then wrapping up with these two powerhouse panel discussions, and then in the middle we had some fun activities as well which we sort of underestimated because we thought that they were very challenging, but our awesome audience, you guys nailed it and killed it in the comments. So, thank you so much for doing that. And one of the reasons why we always have amazing events is because of you, because of the audience that we get every year. They’re always engaging, always making sure that the comment section never dies out. So, thank you so much for doing that.

And that brings us to the close of day one. But that’s not it. We have two more days of action-packed sessions, panel discussions, presentations, and activities. So make sure to tune in tomorrow because tomorrow we’re going to be talking about Black Friday. A few of our sessions are covering that particular topic. So make sure that you tune in tomorrow. We’re going to be starting off with James Kemp and Chris Badgett. That is an amazing panel discussion on Black Friday, and then we will follow it up with Sonja Ibele from Syde. So make sure that you tune in for that as well, and then we will take the rest of the day for activities and more panel discussions and presentations. So that’s pretty much it for day one folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for engaging in the comment section. We will see you tomorrow. Until then take care and bye-bye.