Very soon, AI will let brands know all publicly available info about their customers. This is going to revolutionize ecommerce.

I caved and subscribed to ChatGPT Pro for access to “Deep Research.” This is the tool that scours the internet to write a 5-20 page PhD-level report on a topic of your choice.

As many have said, it’s great.

What I haven’t seen is someone using the tool for deep research about individual non-famous people. So I tried it out on myself. Here’s the report: https://lnkd.in/eGeFpS5Q

Honestly while it’s not exactly what I’d write about myself, it’s very good. It unearthed a couple of interviews with me about my first company, Hubble Contacts, which anyone could find on Google. But it also went back to a 2012 Princeton University article about me which I didn’t even know existed. Overall, I’d easily give it an A.

This got me thinking about what you could do with this tool. Because while Pro users are limited to 100 Deep Research searches a month, I’m sure very soon the cost of this will approach 0, effectively allowing for unlimited searches. What could you do with that?

There are some obvious use cases. For example, if you’re a sales representative getting on a call with a new lead, wouldn’t it be helpful to get a 500 word summary of who the lead is? Their work history, where they went to school, where they live, even their hobbies? Or what topics they’ve written about LinkedIn (this is getting meta)!

Of course, this has the potential to be really weird, so sales reps will probably be trained to not make what they know about someone too obvious. But I think this is going to happen.

How might this affect ecommerce?

Well, maybe the days of one size fits all email campaigns will soon be over. Talk about segmentation–in theory, you could write a personalized email to every single customer in your database. Do you run a sports goods store? Maybe one customer is skiing in their public Facebook profile picture, picked up by Deep Research 3. Boom, they get an email about new skis that just went up for sale.

You can take this even farther. With a tool like Retention.com, you can often identify a site visitor’s email address without them explicitly giving it to you. If Deep Research were fast enough, could you determine who the shopper is from their email and personalize your site itself based on their publicly searchable interests? Why not?

Again, the above techniques clearly have the potential to be creepy. And, if pushed too far, they could even violate data privacy laws (read: do not try in Europe). So once these tools become widely available, I’d recommend that brands start slow. For example, maybe a bag brand emails customers offering to customize their bag with their school logo. Risky? Maybe a little. But probably worth trying.

Deep Research heralds a brave new world where companies can immediately know almost all publicly-available information about their customers. Buckle up.