Artificial Intelligence

London – U.K. home and garden retailer Homebase is using IBM Commerce to provide more personalized shopping experiences by integrating in-store, online and mobile channels.

As a result, Homebase has achieved double-digit sales growth in all digital sales channels and a 30% increase in online visitors. With more than 40% of its customers now visiting online, Homebase collaborated with IBM to help redesign how its digital channels could offer more help, advice and inspiration.

Grapevine, Texas – It’s not something from an episode of the classic black-and-white TV series “The Twilight Zone.” Monsters are coming to a street near you, courtesy of GameStop and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

Armonk, N.Y. - IBM is releasing new design and analytics features as part of IBM marketing cloud to enable brands to address the rising complexity marketers face engaging with customers as individuals. These new capabilities from IBM enable marketers to collaborate, design and deliver customer experiences with a focus on personalization.

Expanded analytics and design capabilities in IBM marketing cloud can be deployed as an integrated solution or as individual offerings. They include:

By Jeff Warren

The theme of SAP’s annual Sapphire conference, in Orlando, Florida, was “Run Simple.” SAP focused on how its HANA business intelligence platform and growing number of HANA-powered applications can assist companies with the complicated task of creating simple enterprises that run on real-time data.

However, underneath the SAP-specific information was a lot of more general insight into how IT is disrupting the way businesses operate and engage their customers. Following are three insights with particular relevance for retailers.

Tyler, Texas – Millennials are gaining buying power, and a substantial shift to Millennials in the retail marketplace will occur by 2020. For 152-store supermarket retailer Brookshire Grocery Co., the time to start reacting to this developing change is now.

“We needed to figure out how to market to this customer base and make it relevant to them,” said John D’Anna, senior VP and CIO of Brookshire Grocery.

Reston, Va. -- Nearly one-half (44%) of retailers used more than five mobile business applications in 2014, while 82% of retailers were able to build a mobile business app in one day or less, according to the “2nd Annual Mobile Business Application Survey” of business and IT decision makers by Canvas.

Among the key survey findings:

Armonk, N.Y. -- IBM and Facebook on Wednesday announced they are teaming up to help retailers and other brands provide more personalization in their marketing efforts on the social network.

The two companies said they are now working together to integrate Facebook’s existing ad technologies, such as Custom Audiences, into IBM’s array of tools and services for retailers.