– Rajiv Pratap
Retail is seeing disruptive innovation driven by AI and Cognitive Computing. AI is impacting everything, everywhere– commerce, in-store digital experience, supply chain, marketing, demand prediction, loss prevention, frictionless (read magical) checkout… this list goes on. In this short update, I will cover how conversational intelligence is instrumenting immersive consumer experience, and the impact of computer vision on loss prevention, more engaged shopping, detecting bottom of basket.
We are creating cognitive bots that use Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, Natural Language Understanding and Generation, Computer Vision to empower consumers and enterprises cognitively. We are helping brands create immersive, intuitive, and painless conversational experience to conduct commerce. Consumers can now interact through the comfort of their messaging and chat applications like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Kik, etc… and can express their desired and needs using text, voice instructions, and pictures/images/video. Such cognitive bots provide a diverse set of functionality that range from being a personalized stylist and trusted advisor, to provide expert advice and recommendations, to providing relevant search results based on their deep understanding of context, and of the consumer’s tastes, preferences, needs and desires.
Imagine having the ability to talk to your favourite brand and tell them that you are looking for a blue suit and a matching pair of tan shoes, or sending a picture (from Instagram) of a pair of shades to your brand and getting personalized product recommendations based on your persona, brand affinity, price band sensitivity, colour preferences, and a plethora of other nuances.
Computer Vision brings automated and nuanced understanding of images, and extracting relevant entities from images, and videos. We have deployed the ability to understand whether the bottom of basket has something, and alerting the checkout associate, or recognizing known offenders, or platinum customers as they walk into the store.
Computer vision has the ability to revolutionize queue management, instrumenting loyalty programs without actually having one by identifying consumers and their (emotional) response to products, shelf positioning, and even creating magical checkout where their bills are created by visually recognizing the SKUs that the consumer has purchased.