Artificial intelligence (AI) over years of being considered just a buzzword is now having a real impact on the retail industry, in many cases deciding about “be or not to be” of companies.
No wonder, today’s merchants collect massive amounts of data on transactions, interactions, and customers’ behaviors, that can be used in decision process improvements and keeping up with ever-changing consumers’ needs. With the old-fashioned, manual way of dealing with it, their efforts are, however, doomed to fail; yet AI occurred to be a “silver bullet” solution.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going hand in hand with Data Engineering (DE) that reshapes retail from the inside out, affecting almost every part of customer experiences both in brick and mortar and online stores.
Below, you can discover top AI solutions for retail industry.
Adoption of AI solutions for retail focuses directly on sales increment. Regardless, it is setting the pricing strategy, prediction demand or customer experience improvement, at the end of a day it is about the number and value of closed deals.
AI – by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data in real time – enables them to establish perfectly optimized sales strategy for the companies no matter their size, scale and industry they are operating in.
AI solutions for retail industry can be a foundation of tailored marketing activities aimed at improving customer retention and preventing customer churn.
With personalized product recommendations and data depicting historical purchase history, brands can implement cross- and up-selling strategies automatically, sending follow-up emails or initiating advertising campaigns. AI automates the human work process, reduces the risk of errors, and speeds up workflows.
We developed custom AI solutions for retail industry to enable organizations to predict changes in consumer demand. The algorithm analyzes data coming from multiple sources, recognizes patterns, finds correlations between them, and converts them into useful signals depicting possible demand fluctuation.
Based on them, businesses can optimize inventory management to efficiently use storage space.
We develop Computer Vision (CV) solutions that train computers to understand what they “see” in the real world. By using digital images from cameras, they can accurately identify and classify objects, and so help to automatically detect deficiencies in specific bulks of goods, suggest proper product placement, and improve control processes.
Equipped with this automatically given information, store managers can optimize the stock visibility, replenish needed goods in real-time while avoiding costly mistakes in doing that.
Although the primary focus of retail companies is set on customer acquisition, the foundation of sustainable growth in revenue, in the long run, is customer retention. To implement effective customer retention strategies, and prevent churn it is crucial to understand how the customers interact with the brand, at what point they are dropping their purchase intention, and what they need to finalize the transaction.
With AI solutions for retail industry that analyze data coming from multiple external and internal sources, it is possible to reinforce the retention-focus efforts by pinpointing where, why and how customers are falling out, and then – make the necessary improvements.
Within omnichannel sales, where the off- and online worlds merge seamlessly, it can be challenging to see the entire customer journey from the helicopter view.
Typically, retailers focus on last- or first touchpoints, but – especially in luxury or B2B sectors – it is hardly an appropriate way to plan the marketing budget.
With AI-powered tools, marketing activities can be a way more sophisticated and tailored to be in line with the very specifically targeted groups instead of arbitrarily given channels.
“Out of stock” banner not only kills sales in the short term, but makes a dent on overall customer experience, which jeopardizes the business in the long term.
Errors in inventory data, unreliable forecasting, constant demand fluctuation are typically the main factor to blame for inventory shortages and no wonder – manually it is very hard to avoid mistakes in planning inventory.
With AI solutions in retail that are able to tackle large amounts of data in real-time it is possible to overcome these bottlenecks by reducing manually processes, reduces the risk of errors, and speeds up workflows.
Manual-driven workflows are typically inefficient, cause end-to-end production lags, condemn employees to perform tedious, repetitive tasks and expose organizations to costs. Because AI solutions in retail are able to automate labor-intensive processes, they can reduce business costs while improving quality.
AI solutions in retail can both support overseeing workflows, reducing human oversight, and ensuring consistent production by eliminating manual tasks, as well.
AI solutions for retail and ML methods help to perform accurate demand prediction based on unique target groups’ shopping behaviors while understanding the seasonal trends.
By connecting and analyzing data from separated silos, AI applications provide retailers with a comprehensive view of store inventory to prevent stock-out occurrences on the one hand and – on the other – to optimize product placement to increase sales.
That is why appropriate pricing strategy becomes one crucial challenge retailers have to tackle.
With AI solutions in retail that analyze competitor pricing strategies, commerce businesses can fix the best product price that attracts customers at the moment. They deliver real-time price optimization based on market conditions.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning models, and natural language programming (NLP) line up with the customers’ need to receive a unique treatment while interacting with brands.
AI solutions in retail solutions enable brands to implement personalization in search engines or loyalty programs to provide customers with tailored offerings and increase the average value order, increase customer engagement, improve loyalty and – last but not least – boost conversion rate.
Shelf-outs – especially when there is no accurate information indicating that a given product or – worse – when the inventory says that it is in store, often cause negative customer experience.
These misleads cost millions in lost sales, not to mention that they also negatively influence customer satisfaction.
With AI solutions in retail, based on Computer Vision, retailers are basically prevented from stock-outs shortages. AI solutions for retail are able to “scan” the inventory visible on the shelves in real-time, and so point out when some products are missing. All of that with no human input.
We design and develop sophisticated and aligned with the unique business needs, data pipelines, that transform data to one format and transport them to a unified data environment.
The pipelines collect data from many disparate silos and collect them into a single warehouse, providing organizations with one single “source of truth” which enables multi departments to make smart business decisions.