EXCLUSIVE: Antony Wildey, VP, Oracle Retail, looks at enterprise AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound affect throughout retail in the next 12 months.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Antony Wildey, VP, Oracle Retail, about how AI will impact retail in areas such CRM, inventory and data management during the upcoming 12 months.
"Many retailers have long been using or experimenting with AI to improve everything from inventory placement to omnichannel delivery," said Wildey. "However, we will continue to see this movement accelerate as brands look to build loyalty and brand affinity, improve margins, and enhance efficiency and results across their operations."
Following are more in-depth thoughts from Wildey on AI's influence on retail CRM, inventory, and data management.
CRM
While artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades, the emergence of ChatGPT and generative AI reignited an interest in the technology across nearly every industry.
In tandem, generative AI will help retailers analyze countless reviews to give insights on current product issues and even predict imminent problems that could be a root cause for returns, such as inconsistent sizing or longevity of the product, etc.
Already, we are seeing some retailers taking advantage of these AI-based tools to help consumers identify and suggest everything from sizing to colors based on the same review information and other predictive data. For instance, if data shows a sweater runs big, the retailer can suggest the customer size down from their standard.
By providing a more holistic view of how a customer views each product, buyers can be able to make better assortment, purchasing and pricing decisions based on sales and a customer’s propensity to like and keep that product.
AI continues to be at the heart of personalization and creating connections with customers. By combining AI and omnichannel services, retailers can improve customer experience through every phase of their shopping journey.
This year, we will see retailers focus less on rolling out or altering existing loyalty programs in favor of better understanding the data around each customer and what moves them from a browser to a buyer and builds lasting brand affinity.
By applying generative AI to harness preexisting loyalty program data, such as past buying behaviors, returns, shopping preferences and more, retailers will have a better understanding of each customer so they can make timely, personalized offers at the right time and place – both online and in-store.
The information can also be used to create generalized ‘look-alike segments’ by identifying trends in customer behaviors, including regional and location-specific attributes to drive assortment planning and marketing decisions.
Inventory
Inventory is the constant scale that retailers need to balance to avoid eroded margins or unhappy customers. Brands will increase the deployment of inventory management and intelligence tools, including automation, AI, and generative AI to help them gain a better understanding of real-time inventory and deliver a more consistent experience for customers in-store and online.
With self-learning and self-tuning approaches to inventory optimization, these tools can assist retailers through integrated capabilities such as embedded forecasting and intelligent pricing capabilities that continuously provide predictive and prescriptive recommendations on what should be in assortments and how to manage and move that inventory most effectively. This can include transfers between stores, promotions and bundling.
Data management
At the center of all these use cases is data. So, before AI can truly be effective, retailers need to integrate all their data across applications and platforms into a common data foundation to increase the likelihood that they derive its full predictive and prescriptive value.
By applying AI and generative AI to that information, retailers can unlock new value and help make a significant impact on their operations, people and bottom line.