Retail has never been a stagnant industry. Retailers just cannot afford to stand still if they want to succeed. They must adapt and innovate, or risk being left behind.
According to an IBM survey, here are 6 fields where retailers would have the biggest ROI when utilizing AI for intelligent automation:
- Supply Chain Planning (85%)
- Demand forecasting (85%)
- Customer Intelligence (79%)
- Marketing and advertising (75%)
- Warehouse operations (73%)
- Pricing and promotion (73%)
Footprints purpose is to bring Customer Intelligence & Marketing and Advertising to the next level. Retailers can capitalize now on the rise of the AI through predictive models applicable to customers’ shopping behaviors. And with hyper-personalized marketing & advertising (#retailmedia).
Categorization-Type AI for Physical Retail
“Group these similar things”
Knowing the categories (groups), the system can better learn the relationship, similarities, and differences.
Given that retailers have massive catalogue of products that can change and shift very quickly – as products on sale can change in price or sell out – the retail industry needs clever solutions.
For retail product management & category management, AI can transform the daily operations and the strategy with scalable models.
Categorization is the process of grouping products with tags and attributes. We can think of this as the first step in the general taxonomy of a retailer and the foundation of intelligent category management.
With the help of AI, retail organizations can build tools that could classify millions of products in near real-time.
Simply put, the categorization models that the retail teams can implement would tag a trainer, for example, understanding it was a trainer made of a specific material, in a specific color, with a certain heel etc. Similarly, a shirt would be classified as such, with tags for sleeve length, collar type, pattern type and more.
Examples of Categorization-Type AI in Physical Retail:
• You have 1,000,000 customers. Separate the young moms from all the rest
• You have 1,000,000 customers. Group them into hierarchies of their Lifetime Value combined with Life stage
• You have 1,000,000 customers. Label each customer with their loyalty value.
What Categorization-Type AI can offer to retailers?
- Product & Category Management & Operations
- Trends spotting in terms of purchases and brand affinities
- Customer value segmentation & management
- Data annotation
- Customer review management
- Fraud detection
- Demand management
- Pricing management
The application of #artificialntelligence in retail is set to fundamentally change the shopping experience for customers and retailers. The friction-less store experience is the fundamental approach to blurring the line between in-store and online.
