AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

Artificial intelligence in retail is being applied in new ways across the entire product and service cycle—from assembly to post-sale customer service interactions, but retail players need answers to important questions:

In a global market that makes room for more competitors by the day, some companies are turning to AI and machine learning to try to gain an edge. Supply chain and inventory management is a domain that has missed some of the media limelight, but one where industry leaders have been hard at work developing new AI and machine learning technologies over the past decade.

When businesses make investments in new technologies, they usually do so with the intention of  creating value for customers and stakeholders and making smart long-term investments. This is not always an easy thing to do when implementing cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Business intelligence case studies that show how these technologies have been leveraged with results are still scarce, and many companies wonder where to apply machine learning first (a question at the core of one of Emerj's most recent expert consensuses.)
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have certainly increased in capability over the past few years. Predictive analytics can help glean meaningful business insights using both sensor-based and structured data, as well as unstructured data, like unlabeled text and video, for mining customer sentiment. In the last few years, a shift toward "cognitive cloud" analytics has also increased data access, allowing for advances in real-time learning and reduced company costs. This recent shift has made an array of advanced analytics and AI-powered business intelligence services more accessible to mid-sized and small companies.
In this article, we provide five case studies that illustrate how AI and machine learning technologies are being used across industries to help drive more intelligent business decisions. While not meant to be exhaustive, the examples offer a taste for how real companies are reaping real benefits from technologies like advanced analytics and intelligent image recognition.

Technology Provider: Optimove

User Company: Adore Me

Industry: Consumer Retail

There is a certain level of stigma that exists around using machine learning and location data in business applications, understandably due to risks inherent in exploitation of individual privacy. But if we look under the hood of society's daily web of interactions, we see that the location information economy—from GPS to radio signal based-triangulation to geo-tagged images and beyond—is now almost ubiquitous, from the moment we track our morning commute to the end-of-day search for healthy and convenient take-out for dinner.

With all the excitement and hype about AI that’s “just around the corner”—self-driving cars, instant machine translation, etc.—it can be difficult to see how AI is affecting the lives of regular people from moment to moment. What are examples of artificial intelligence that you're already using—right now?

In July of 2016, we sent out a series of survey questions to past guests who have been featured on the Emerj podcast, including academic researchers, founders, and executives who are experts in the machine learning domain. In this article, we focus on responses to the following question:

Episode Summary: Right now, you can take a picture of a flower in your garden and post it on social media to see if anyone knows its proper name. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if a machine could identify the correct name and species in the picture you just took? Solving this problem in applications of machine vision is something that CEO Igal Raichelgauz and his team are working on at Cortica, a machine learning company that is not focused on deep learning, but is instead taking a more "shallow" approach. In this episode, Raichelgauz articulates Cortica's approach, which is based on neurology and goes against some of the current approaches in getting machines to learn. We discuss some of these primary differences and dive into Cortica's goals for applying machine vision in consumer products.