AI Articles and Analysis in Consumer goods

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. 

Forrester estimated that online sales in Western Europe will grow at an average of 11.9% annually until 2022. Over this period, 21% of non-grocery retail sales will be online. We see AI as continuing to find its way into the retail industry. This report specifically focuses on innovation in the European retail industry. In it, we cover vendors offering AI software across three applications:

There are several companies claiming to offer AI-based sentiment analysis solutions to companies, specifically their marketing and product development departments. In fact, some of the largest tech companies are offering these solutions to medium and large enterprises. We found these solutions are intended to help companies with at least one of the following business problems:

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 reported that 42% of questioned executives think AI will be “of critical importance” within two years. We researched the marketing space to discover how and where AI might be driving business value for companies in marketing. Some companies are finding results using AI-powered personalized marketing strategies. 

Data is essential when it comes to building machine learning models for business applications. A strong AI strategy is predicated on data that is specific to the business problem a company is trying to solve, as outlined in our recent article: Data Collection and Enhancement Strategies for AI Initiatives in Business. When it comes to executing on that strategy, oftentimes the first thing a company needs to do is collect some or all of the data it will need to build the right machine learning model for its use case.

Episode Summary: We speak this week with Aneesh Reddy, cofounder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, which focuses on machine vision applications in the retail environment.

Adoption of chatbots—coded programs that can engage in some degree of conversation with human inputs, often through the help of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning—is undoubtedly a growing trend. There are thousands of chatbots in use today, on websites, messaging apps, and social platforms. It follows that bots would find a prominent place in the retail world.