AI Articles and Analysis about Sales

Accenture forecasts that the retail industry could grow operating profits to $2.95 trillion by 2025. We've covered AI in retail extensively on Emerj, and in this report, we dive into the Asian startups that are offering AI solutions to retailers. Asian AI vendors seem to offer retailers solutions for marketing, sales, operations, and making purchases easier, among other areas. 

Episode Summary: This week we talk to Alejandro Giacometti, the data science lead at a company called EDITED, based in London. The company claims to help retailers with inventory optimization, and we speak with Giacometti about how artificial intelligence can be used to search the web for the product clusters and individual products of major retailers to help inform other retailers on which products might be popular.

Deloitte estimated the size of the global travel and tourism industry at around $1.6 trillion in 2017. When adding in the indirect and induced economic contributions of related activities, the travel and tourism industry accounts for 10.4% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Episode Summary: Prominent technology companies like Google and Amazon lead the way in the B2C world, having access to streams of searches, clicks, and online purchases. They have access to large volumes of consumer data points numbering in the billions that can be used to train machine learning algorithms.

Episode Summary: Over the last year, we've covered a lot of marketing applications, including a survey of the landscape of machine learning in marketing applications and which industries will be affected first. But marketing doesn't tell the whole story when it comes to B2B sales. At some point, we need to take these clicks and turn them into appointments, for example.

Episode summary: Sales forecasting is big business. If you can better predict how much of a certain product or service you will sell in a given day, you can better stock inventory, better staff your facilities, and ultimately keep more margin in your business's accounts.

The amount of data companies have on customers and the number of channels customers are using to interact with businesses have grown significantly in the past decade. Artificial intelligence may hold great promise in optimizing customer and client interactions.

Expert systems and machine learning are two ends of a spectrum working to solve similar problems quite differently. One one hand you have if-then scenarios and a logical approach, and on the other you have vast neural networks and a big data approach. Some companies exist to try and bridge the gap between the if-then rule systems and the massive piles of data. They hope to find a middle ground of sorts, one that mitigates their individual disadvantages. One such company is Montreal’s fuzzy.ai.