AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

Sam Walton opened his first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962, capitalizing on his twelve years of success running Walton's 5&10 in downtown Bentonville seven miles down the road. Walton founded his company on the idea that retail could succeed by offering great value and great service. His competitors thought his idea was doomed to fail. Today, almost sixty years later, Walmart has transformed itself into a multinational corporate supergiant ranked as the largest company in the United States by gross sales in 2020, according to the Fortune 500.

Founded by Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne, and Steve Wozniak in 1976, Apple is a global technology corporation specializing in consumer devices, software, and online services. 

Leading retailers - like Walmart, Stop & Shop, and Home Depot - are enhancing their payment and fraud detection systems, using artificial intelligence that learns transaction norms and infers risk from the context of each transaction.

Supply chains contain every material, component, product and packaging for the objects that together compose the world we live in. However, there is an often invisible ingredient to successful supply chains: data. 

The retail industry collects massive amounts of data every day, and this makes its key processes ripe for automation with machine learning. Along with the manufacturing sector, the retail industry likely stands to benefit the most from one particular AI technique in the next few years: machine vision, also known as computer vision.

The retail and eCommerce sectors were among the first to adopt natural language processing (NLP) in the enterprise, particularly by way of chatbots and conversational interfaces. In this article, we cover three ways retailers can use NLP to automate business processes and offer the customer a better experience. We also give examples of AI vendors that offer this technology and describe their products. The NLP capabilities we discuss include:

The retail industry could be losing nearly $1 trillion in sales annually due to business process errors that could be automated by AI, such as restocking in eCommerce. In this article, we discuss the top 3 most well-funded AI startups selling to the retail industry and how their solutions could help retailers and eCommerce sites save money lost to fraud and increase revenue through customer analytics.
Signifyd - Retail and eCommerce Fraud Detection
Signifyd is the most well-funded AI startup in the fraud detection industry for retail and eCommerce, having raised $180 million. They were founded in August 2011 and specialize in fraud detection for retail and eCommerce companies. Their most prominent offering is called “guaranteed fraud detection,” and it likely uses anomaly detection technology to recognize fraudulent transactions and prevent chargebacks. The offering was originally announced exclusively for the Magento eCommerce platform in 2017.

Many AI vendor companies offer AI-enabled products and services for pushing more and more products in front of customers. That said, it is not always clear how these solutions determine which products to advertise to which customers. Retailers and other businesses should consider what they need to do to prepare their enterprise for one of these solutions and familiarize themselves with how AI recommendations are built and trained.