Insights

Realize business potential with Gen AI this holiday season

Author: Jose Magno

The holiday season is quickly approaching, and retailers are gearing up for one of the biggest shopping seasons of the year as customers sort through a deluge of promotions across retailers. Email inboxes overflow with offers, and customers face overwhelming choices as they try to identify the best deals, which come in generic promotions for items they’ve already purchased – all of which just adds to their frustration.

This is where Artificial intelligence (AI) can deliver exciting opportunities for retailers to elevate their game this holiday season. Most experts would agree that retailers should approach AI thoughtfully, balancing customer needs, retailers’ immediate campaign needs, and overall corporate goals of growing the business.

Using generative AI to humanize interactions

Customers expect personalized shopping experiences. Until recently, sophisticated commerce, marketing automation, and advertising platforms used what you already knew about your customers to target them for new purchases. While using AI, you can create highly detailed customer profiles based on online behaviors, purchase history, and product reviews to predict future needs better, we are seeing an increasing need for humanized interactions.

Generative AI presents an enormous opportunity to uplift the customer experience by having human-like conversations with customers. This can take the form of online assistants that engage in human-like conversations with customers to solve issues and answer various questions. Generative AI can also simultaneously analyze thousands of product reviews and user images to generate a personalized summary tailored to the reader’s interests, level of understanding, and background. There are many applications for generative AI in this context.

Key example: a non-technical grandfather is presented with information and reviews about a product that generative AI tailors to his understanding while buying a technology gift for his grandson.

Establishing generative AI readiness

While AI can unlock big opportunities for the holiday season, retailers should identify high-value use cases to test the technology and take the key learnings from technical, functional, and business standpoints. As generative AI evolves, it may learn to use such data to dive further into other elements of the business, such as production and resource planning, and even direct collaboration with suppliers. Consider using these key steps to lay the proper AI groundwork and drive generative AI adoption for your company.

1. Resources: Put the right team in place, as AI requires a different type of technical resource. This team should be comprised of professionals who understand data science, AI models, and their outputs, data ethics, and the details behind algorithms.
2. Data: Carefully evaluate data sources since AI depends on high-quality data. Before embarking on your AI journey, analyze available data on inventory, customers, pricing, promotions, etc.
3. Data Governance: You’ll need to document the data used for AI and implement access controls and policies to ensure quality, privacy, and compliance.
4. Testing: Testing AI models is essential to fix issues before going live.
5. Data/AI Ethics: Adopt AI responsibly, be ethical, and set realistic expectations about what AI will deliver.
6. Security: AI comes with its own unique security risks your team needs to be ready to handle, things like AI-enhanced cyber attacks, data poisoning, model theft or inversion, evasion attacks, and more – all of these risks mean your team needs to be ready.
7. Infrastructure: Plan for future growth by implementing the technical infrastructure needed for the continued development and expansion of AI capabilities.

Let us work together to achieve your AI vision

We are focused on helping you overcome business IT challenges that relied on our:

• Expertise and Experience: With a focused practice on AI and machine learning frameworks, we are a forward-thinking company with expertise to understand complex systems and recommend data-driven solutions tailored to your unique needs.
• Industry Insight: We understand the pressures businesses face today and how emerging technologies like AI can drive real impact.
• Commitment to Transformation: We view AI as a journey of continuous learning and improvement and are constantly expanding our capabilities to transform operations with AI.
• Trusted Governance Approach: With rigorous processes like an annual ISO 27001 audit, we can provide the governance required to ensure customer data ethics and privacy.

Tap into our expertise to turn your organization’s AI vision into reality. We have helped many customers across all verticals realize theirs. Contact us today to see how we can do the same for you.