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Sure, but we don’t need to be sat next to them. A large e-commerce company can A/B test new models to improve. The success metric is revenue.

For smaller customer bases this is a tricky problem, but I’d argue that automated recommendations don’t work at a small scale anyway so manual curation is king.

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If you do it right, automated recommendations work also for smaller customer bases. There's a lot of redundancy in customer and product data that can be exploited to generalise the behaviour of groups of customers over groups of products.

Doing this automatically is a huge positive ROI thing over manual curation. In fact, humans are not even that good at coming up with good recommendations. Manual re-arrangement has almost universally been an anti-relevance feature in A/B tests I've looked at.

But of course, almost nobody does the automation right.

That's the good part: putting in place a simple system will beat manual recommendations. Sadly even moderately big businesses lack sometimes automated recommendations. There are several companies that offer the service but I don't know how many clients they get. Why the disinterest? No idea, I value good recommendations as a customer but maybe it's not that relevant in the big picture.

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