It is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence is the future of most jobs in the world. Retailers are not left out of the list, because AI is used to optimize work and improve business performance. Alla retailer desire is to make more profit and tailoring products to suit the taste of consumers. A retailer with an abundant supply chain and a large customer base will require an intuitive research development team to reduce shipping cost and enhance the supply chain by personalizing the shopping experience; this is where AI comes to action.
The advent of technology has brought a new dawn to the business sector, whereby Artificial Intelligence is shaping the future by helping retailers generate insights from their extensive customerdata.
Smart Retailers are leveraging on the computational ability of Artificial Intelligence application to gain deeper insights about their customers, which in turn improve the retailer’s empathy for their customers to enhance ethical decision-making. AI can also enhance the marketing strategy, customer relations, and operation of retailers.
Retailers that leverage on AI tends to increase efficiency and profitability. According to IBM, AI will revolutionize retail by improving to supply chain planning to 85%, demand forecasting to 85%and customer intelligence 79% in the year 2019.
How AI will help Retailers to level up
1. Customer Intelligence
With the assistance of AI, retailers can obtain better and insightful information about their customers. It is not novel that consumers expect a lot from the retailer. So, to help the retailer create a convenient and targeted experience for each consumer, retailers need data.The data are processed by Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to create a personalized experience for consumers both online and in-store to make them feel special.
A report shows that most of the purchases on Amazon are through the recommendation engine. This is possible by using AI to monitor consumer’s purchase pattern and generate a recommendation engine through the data. Other AI related technologies used by tech-oriented retailers to improve customer intelligence are chatbots, visual images, and curated contents. There is no doubt it is a game changer in the industry.
2. Pricing and Promotion
For a small retailer, it might be easy to come about a price strategy, but a large enterprise retailer might find it hard to come to about a price strategy. Any error in the process will bring about a loss in the side of the retailer. A retailer in this bracket can now use AI to analyze the price of each product to come out with a potential return on investment of different pricing strategies.
AI also makes it attainable to have dynamic pricing, take for example AliExpress, a retailer store uses dynamic pricing foreach member on their customer’s loyalty scheme, which presents different prices for different consumers.
3. Demand Forecasting
A retailer needs to forecast demand to avoid overstock or out of stock scenario, which will cost loss of profitability to the retailer. AI can be used to predict market using sales history, promotions and trends to generate outcomes, which are 90% accurate. Optimizing this problematic process will reduce financial risks linked with excess stock and under-performing products.
AI is the new disruption in the tech space,and it also helps retailers to sum up data to generate a robust algorithm to earth insights about customers, demand and supply chain strategies it is too fascinating to let go.