Artificial Intelligence

By Joe Dalton    As technologies advance, social channels proliferate, and consumers become more plugged into digital marketing, personalization and contextualization is becoming the key to connecting with customers. While consumers build their online identities simply by using their devices for everything from browsing to averting traffic, they leave trails of their preferences, behavior, and values that retailers can draw upon to appeal to the interests of each individual customer.   

Boston – The in-store customer experience is going to get a lot more personalized and timely. According to a new special report by Boston Retail Partners (BRP), “Real-time Retail – The New Retail Imperative,” by 2020 nearly two-thirds of retailers will identify a customer when they walk in the store via their smartphone.  In addition, 76% of retailers plan to provide suggested selling based on a customer’s previous purchases within three years.

Other key findings gathered from recent BRP surveys include:

London, U.K. — Honest Cafe, an automated coffee house chain in London, is using IBM Watson Analytics to unearth client insights to help determine everything from coffee products and pricing, to marketing and promotions. Honest Cafe is a new venture from Revive Vending where three cafes currently in operation, and four more planned, are all unmanned.

Best Buy is inspiring young people across the country to consider technology careers with summer camp sessions called the Geek Squad Academy.

This grassroots tech experience inspires underserved teens to consider technology careers and help address the nation’s widely anticipated professional labor shortage.

We are in a golden age of big data and analytics in which technology enables retailers to be more lean, efficient and competitive than ever. There are companies with solutions that address everything from pricing optimization and marketing effectiveness to optimal modular assortments and cybersecurity threats.

Brooklyn, N.Y. – Etsy Inc. reportedly employs Big Data and artificial intelligence systems to better target individual customers with personalized offers. According to the New York Times, Etsy uses tools including an open source machine learning framework called Conjecture, as well as an open source Apache solution called Kafka and in-house Hadoop, to monitor real-time data for fast processing and storage.

My latest retail IT-related travels took me to the Retail Experience Center at Microsoft headquarters (in Redmond, Washington), where I toured a simulated shopping mall environment that demonstrated a variety of innovative ways the company is using technology to enhance customer engagement for retailers.  Here are the three most interesting solutions from that visit:

A Beacon for Coffee Drinkers

New York -- Target Corp. will beat Amazon.com by following three core philosophies,  the retailer’s top digital executive (and former Amazon.com exec) Jason Goldberger said during a keynote address at the annual Internet Retailer Conference and Exposition, in Chicago.