AI's New Role in Retail as A Duplication Eliminator
Retailers today are in constant search for ways to cope with increasing competition, operational costs, and mounting pressure. As always, most of the strategies towards achieving these are centered on enhancing the consumer experience at different levels. Category duplication is among the immediate concerns which act as a roadblock towards ensuring consumer satisfaction.
It is a challenge for retailers to carry out rationalization of categories without negatively influencing a customer’s perception of options.
Studies have observed that about 17 percent of items within a given category exhibit a duplicative nature in the retail sector. With these many items showing a duplicative tendency, retailers may be unintentionally leading to undue stress and confused shoppers. At times, presence of too many options, in-store or online, empowers customers not to choose.
It is critical to optimize assortment offerings through an understanding of the customer’s perception of choice. However, it is not as easy as it sounds to be. In order to be confident about rationalized decisions, one has to master massive data sets to derive insights and be able to take actions on those insights spontaneously. Achieving these together would mean going beyond conventional retail practices. Many retailers resort to technology, with artificial intelligence (AI) being the most coveted among them. What adds to AI’s aptness is its ability to carry out both the tasks.

AI’s Emergence in the Retail Sector
During the last few years, AI has made interesting advancements across several sectors, and retail has been one of them. Not all retailers have begun to incorporate AI technologies, but a significant part of retailers have. What creates a gap between retailers and adaptation into AI are factors like inaccessibility, proprietary systems, and high costs.
Today, more and more retailers are adapting to this technology. AI in retail is the perfect option to learn about customers’ shopping preferences by analyzing vast amounts of data. Through AI, it becomes easy to know what a customer would like and wouldn’t beforehand. As AI produces this information quickly, a retailer can offer discounts or other attractive features on the preferred products by the customer, the retailers can make them buy more and extend superior customer preference.
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