By Kimeko McCoy • September 10, 2024 •
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Marketers’ attention to the industry’s latest shiny object, generative AI, has yet to shift out of focus. Some agencies have moved to ink enterprise-level deals with major AI players, like OpenAI, Runway and soon, Perplexity. As these AI-powered tools continue to flood the marketplace, agencies and brands alike say they’re creating auditing policies to ensure data security, stability and fairness. It’s a similar story at Babylist, a baby registry company, according to Lee Anne Grant, chief growth officer of Babylist.
“Even before AI, when we tried to build things in-house, our founder and CEO would always say, ‘I always want to see the recommendations of the machine against a human and just gut check it’,” Grant said.
On this episode of the Digiday Podcast, Grant talks about how babylist is navigating the AI hype cycle and what the roadmap ahead looks like. Also on this episode, Digiday catches up with Grant about Babylist’s retail media network efforts and its value proposition to advertisers.
Below are highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
The vetting process
We have the privacy technology vetting and then the user experience vetting. Our IT team has a strong checklist for any AI tool we’re going to use and says, “At Babylist, are we comfortable with how they would be using our data?” We start there and then the second part is: Is the quality better? As a user, I don’t care about, and maybe I actually don’t want an AI-powered experience. So, the AI experience has to actually beat the manual experience, or the current experience. At the end of the day, is the actual output better? Is this product experience better? And if it’s not, then it’s not the right tool for us.
The case against in-housing AI tech
Going back to what we said we were going to bring in-house is really all of the creative, all of the strategy. We are not an AI company. Babylist is actually a technology company. We have a number of engineers and product people. Our CEO is an engineer. She coded Babylist from scratch and her code is still alive. But we use Shopify for our e-commerce. We’re not going to build our own e-commerce. I would put AI in the same bucket, where we’re going to use the best tools out there. But again, we’re not going outside to source our creativity, our user experience.
Product and service offering roadmap
Our biggest focus is just simply extending the relationship with our users. As I said earlier, they are highly engaged, they create their registry and then they actually continue to come back to us. We send them emails until their baby is three years old. They read those emails, we give them guidance. So what other products and services can we add on top of that? That’s our guiding light at the highest level.
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