How to use AI to save money shopping

If you've ever spent hours researching a purchase, only to still feel unsure or worse realise later that you've paid too much, this episode is for you. Shopping has become more complex, more time consuming and more expensive than it needs to be. In this How AI Episode Neo and I, get practical about how to use AI as your personal shopping assistant. We'll learn how to compare products without drowning in specs, cut through biased reviews, find the best price and discount codes and even set up AI to watch prices for you so that you can buy with confidence and save money without the overwhelm. Welcome to How AI AI with me, Dr. Amat Limba and Neo Apleen Head of Inventium AI. Each episode we share one practical way to use AI better at work and in life. No fluff, no tech jargon, just things you can use straight away. So we are recording this a few weeks after Christmas break and I think it's fair to say that a lot of people do a lot of shopping over that time of year or this time of year and I know that you and I, Neo, both use AI a lot in helping us make good decisions with shopping and importantly saving money. So let's talk through a journey of buying something. What do you want to use as an example? What is something that you've recently bought and used AI for that process? I've been looking for, I've been for the past two or three months for a music streamer. So it's like a sonarcy thing. I've got an app I've had for 10 years or something like that. But I want to be able to stream from my phone to this app through a box. There are so many of these on the market and I don't know which one is good. I don't know which one is bad and where you buy them from, which features they've got, what kind of plugs they've got, all those kind of things. I use Plexity a lot for that. I use some of the other AI tools for some of it but I found Plexity was awesome for comparing these two different products, comparing social reviews on these things, which one should I get, pros and cons, all those kind of things. So for researching of what product you need to solve your problem, because that's generally what I am buying, then AI is amazing for that. So what can you give me examples of the types of prompts that you're putting in and also what you're getting Plexity to search, because I know that you can have it searched. The internet you can have it searched social media. So take us through in more detail how you're using it there. Yep, so it might be, here's the problem I've got, what could I use to solve it or what other people doing to solve that kind of problem. So it's like at the start of your journey, really good for those kind of things. When you're starting to find a couple of products, then I would do a comparison. So I've got here what's the difference between product A and product B and Plexity will compare that. Often it puts it in a table, which I really like, to be able to say different prices, different features, different versions, really good for software comparison as well. Like if I'm going to buy a software A or software B, what does it have, those kind of things. I often bring in a solution C into the mix and then have a discussion with AI. Like it was my personal shopping assistant, my shopping consierge. Like, is this better than that? Why would I use this one over that one? Like, actually use those kind of questions and get it to tell you why I'd buy one thing over another. Like here's an example, I have an old PlayStation 4. I don't game enough to warrant buying a PlayStation 5, but I still look at a PlayStation 5. And I saw there's a PlayStation 5 Pro and it's like, what's it between that and the basics and is it going to dish drive all those kind of things? AI is really good to give you those easy comparisons. Other than that, what you're going to do is either buy the wrong one or you're going to spend an awful lot of time searching the internet. It's really useful for things that are really complicated like TVs or washing machines. Like all the dev features on washing machines, I don't know what they are and they go proprietary different names for the same thing as the other company. Get AI to sort the complexity out for you so you can then decide what you want to buy. And so you said, "Poplexity is your go-to." Why complexity over chat GPT? Because they both search the internet. Yes, they do. I prefer complexity for a couple of reasons. One is it's, for me, it's been the granddaddy of the AI+ internet together. The others added into internet later. So it's almost like the internet, or an afterthought as far as it goes because a complexity is a bit like Google it searches the internet and it has indexes on the internet and things like that. Under the hood, chat GPT is simply using, actually it's being under the hood. It'll run a Bing search and then read the top 10 pages on Bing and give it back to you. Whereas, complexity is its own thing. It does its own searches. If you're a Google person and you love your Google ecosystem, Google's got an AI mode which does a really similar thing to complexity. So give that a go as well. In fact, you what you might do is what I do is do an A/B test, try your prompt in complexity, try the same prompt in the AI mode on Google and see whether you get a different response. And how do you access AI mode on Google because it's not to be confused with the AI overview that Google also gives if you're in normalgoogle.com? Yeah, with Google, if you go to Google.com, like not your address bar at the top and not the home page on your browser, like actually go to Google.com and you'll notice that in the search box in the middle of the page, on the right hand side there's a thing that says AI mode. And when you click on that, it looks really similar to like Gemini and Chachyputi and Kopat, it looks like a large language model. And with that AI mode, you can give more background. One of the things about that is general searching on Google, you've got to use keyword search. So it might be best PlayStation gaming 2025. Something like, you feel like you're a caveman, right? And you're just giving keyword now go kind of thing. Whereas with the AI mode, you can give more background. So you could say, I'm an occasional gamer, but I've got a whole bunch of PlayStation 4 discs. So I want to play it on PlayStation 5. How do I do that? Or I'm after a washing machine for a family of four. What's the best one to buy rather than just best washing machine 2025, right? So AI mode can take that context and does a much better job of it. Perfection does the same. More context you can give it the better. Obviously, don't upload company documents if you're not allowed to. OK, let's talk about saving money because I think that that matters to everyone. So how do you use AI once you've decided on the product that you're buying to find the best price? What are you using and how are you prompting it? I go between AI mode on Google and also complexity to find that best price. And so once I've decided what I want, so this streamer that I bought is the Weem Ultra, believe it or not. And I was like, where do I buy it and weem Ultra? What's the best price? What's the best historical low price? So I've got those kind of things in there. Now, interesting enough, it gave me a bunch of retails that I hadn't heard of. But then I was like, no, no, I want Australian ones. And then obviously refined down if you want to see something locally, like a washing machine, maybe you want to see it touch a player, then go, I only want Melbourne. Or I only want Sydney or wherever you might live. Or you might say, I've got a budget of this, find me products that fit that budget. Or it might be, what's on special this month or what's the historical lows, those kind of things. So you can work with it to get the kind of price information that you want. I like the historical lows. How would you use that? If you wanted to buy something in the next couple of months and the historical low was, I don't know, I'll significantly less than it is now. Can you prompt the AI to tell you when to expect the next low or predict sales or anything like that? Well, that's a good one. You probably could, like if the last historical low was a Black Friday sales, then it will probably predict that it'll be the next Black Friday sales. So you could do that, where I'd probably use the AI as if you don't need to buy that things right away. What you could do is get a scheduled prompt. So in chat chat, you can go buy that and others. You can get it to do something every so often. So you might say every week, I want you to search these eight websites for this product. If the price is below this price, then I want you to let me know. Or something like that. Or give me a list of the prices for this product across those 10 retails. You'll then highlight that and then continue an email each day each week when it runs that prompt. So it's a scheduled prompt that you can do in chat chat and in co-pilot and others. Now another way to save money is through discount codes. How are you using AI to help find those discount codes? Well, not everywhere. How's the discount code as much as I want everywhere to have a discount code? And some of the discount codes they disappear in their old or all those kind of things. The problem is finding them. And the problem is finding ones that are up to date. There are discount code websites and I've found them to be scammy, spammy, disgusting, whatever. I've found just as good if not better using publicity, better results using publicity. So they still can be out of date. They still may not work. But at least you don't go through that scammy spammy stuff. And I found it's actually easier better faster. So what kind of a problem? Are you putting into complexity to find good discount codes? Help me find discount codes for the retailer you've picked, or help me find discount codes for this product, for this retailer, or any retailer who can button sell this particular product. So if you're doing, I don't know, make up, you might say, "A door beauty." Maybe that's, you know, don't have discount codes going at the moment or something. And it'll search a whole bunch of internet websites and socials, the other cool thing about complexity, you can say, search social sources in particular. So whether that discount code's been shared on some kind of community forum, it'll be more likely to pick those kind of things up. So yeah, you can find discount codes on complexity. Once again, not 100%, but it's still pretty good. Amazing, Niko, thank you so much for sharing how we can save money when we are going, shopping, lots of awesome tips that I hope. Maybe might save listeners some money today if you happen to be buying something. Thank you. If you found this useful, please help us spread the AI love and share it with someone who you think would benefit from knowing what you now know. And if you're ready to really start mastering AI, check out inventium.ai. We help individuals, teams and organizations turn gen AI into a real work superpower, saving 10 plus hours a week and staying future ready without the jargon or overwhelm. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time on How I AI. How I AI was hosted by me Amanda Imber and Niko Applen. I beg thank you to Martin Imber who does our sound editing and gem Rubio for production support and thank you to John Kilby who composed the theme music.