AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

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.

Many of the top Fortune 500 retailers have begun using AI and ML to solve business problems for various departments. Walmart and Costco share one in grocery stocking, which includes the freshness and condition of the products along with timing the restocks for peak hours.

We spoke to Moe Tanabian, General Manager of Intelligent Devices at Microsoft, who is speaking at the AI Edge Summit in Mountain View, California on September 17 and 18. Tanabian discusses how to think about and reframe business problems to make them more accessible for AI, as well as AI at the edge, which involves doing AI processing on individual devices rather than in the cloud. The edge could open up new potential for business problems to be solved with AI. Tanabian also provides representative use cases of intelligent devices.