AI is being applied in new ways across the whole of retail — from reducing production defects to recommending products to customer service.
Manufacturing
Computer vision systems have bought benefits across the manufacturing industry, from production lines to warehouses to robotics in R&D labs. AI-enabled systems can help reduce defects, optimise assembly and drive business savings.
Recommender systems
These are tools that can suggest personalised products or services to customers, help to increase business sales and attract more customers. A whopping 35% of purchases on Amazon come from product recommendation systems. When these systems were introduced into China’s biggest e-commerce company, Alibaba, they reported a 50% revenue increase.
Customer services
Customers can ask for product recommendations from chatbots. More and more businesses are turning to chatbots, relying on them as a key part of their customer service strategy. Chatbots resolve simple questions quickly, save on operational costs, improve response times and frees people to tackle more complex queries and do more.
Marketing
AI can target marketing campaigns at the right customers by creating customer-specific ads based upon their region, preferences, and purchase habits. Not only does this benefit conversion rates it also improves customer loyalty and customer retention. This is crucial as, typically, 80% of future profit comes from 20% of existing customers.
Fraud detection
Payment fraud is an ideal application for machine learning and AI. Using a multi-pronged approach and carefully selecting AI techniques previously unseen forms of suspicious behavior can be detected whilst, at the same time, recognising the more subtle patterns of fraud that have been previously observed across billions of accounts.