Most business leaders now understand that the new class of generative artificial intelligence tools will have an impact on their business. But not everyone has internalized the underlying financial reason why the competitive landscape will rapidly change around them, which is this: there’s no longer a need for the trade-off between quality, cost and speed.

Generally speaking, increasing quality has traditionally meant increasing cost or increasing time spent. In the retail context, if you wanted every product image on your website to look better, a lot more money needed to be spent on photographers, studios and image editing. If you wanted every VIP customer to receive a personalized note from an associate or stylist, budget would need to be opened up. If you wanted rich, vivid and more detailed product descriptions in multiple languages, it would take many months and more headcount.

Now, for the first time ever, retailers can easily tap into the power of AI to improve the quality of everything — content, imagery, workflows, analytics — while simultaneously dramatically reducing both cost and speed to market.