According to Gartner, three of the many imaginable AI use cases in retail, made it to the top quadrant, delivering the highest business value AND being most feasible in terms of easy deployment.
#Personalisation ranks third. No wonder as it has proven its relevance in e-commerce already, not only among Gen Z consumers. AI does open many doors to data source convergence that now also allows (hyper-)personalisation in brick and mortar retail.
On the second place, Gartner identified #onshelfavailability. No surprise yet again, as many studies circle around the impact of avoidance of out-of-stock with net profit upside potentials in the range of up to four percent.
The winner may come to some as a surprise, though not if you think twice: #priceoptimisation and mark-down optimisation. Every cent in sales we give away means a cent in profit gone out of the door. Retailers lose millions through unnecessary and unthoughtful discounts, or missed opportunities for increases where price sensitivities are low. With today's technologies such as #ESL based digital pricing and AI-based predictive pricing software it is incredibly low hanging fruit for retailers of all segments to gain remarkable margin upsides despite of fierce competition and price-conscious consumers.
While most leading food retailers in Europe have done their homework and deployed #dynamicpricing technology in combination with ESL, the #fashion retail is the next big segment, as the apparel market has an even larger potential to enhance the bottom line through price optimisation. End-of-season painful markdowns in partially desperate attempts to clear unsold stock still is common place. Somewhat understandably, manual price changes are cumbersome as they are costly, and with an increasing lack of store personnel it ain't get any better. Early adopters in the apparel industry now have started to deploy #FashionESL (ultra-light digital price tags for softgoods) and AI-based predictive pricing. They utilise the geo-location feature these tags provide, thus being able to leap further benefits (permanent inventory, materially accelerated click&collect, customer interaction and analytics, smart fitting room and anti-shoplifting are just a few features of a long list of benefits those smart tags can deliver).
I just came back from the #TWTechSummit organised by TextilWirtschaft in Berlin last week where a great example was shared by Christoph Berger, CEO of Ebbers Modeerlebnis in Warendorf, Germany. If you are interested in this topic, I can share more details. Just drop me a note in the comments.
