There are four key impact areas for retailers seeking to improve shopper engagement and loyalty, while driving overall revenue growth and profitability – merchandising, marketing, store operations and supply chain.
Perhaps the best place to start is with a simple definition of what artificial intelligence is. AI is a computer program that augments what humans would otherwise need to do, including autonomously learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and language understanding.
With this definition as background, let’s dive deeper into the four aforementioned areas:
Merchandising
The biggest opportunity to leverage AI in merchandising is centered around intelligent pricing, promotions, and markdowns all integrated with a highly accurate, unified data-driven demand forecasting engine. Most retailers have either heard of or used previous generation price optimization, promotion optimization, markdown optimization, often with mixed results. AI capabilities that are significantly more advanced than these prior systems.
Marketing
AI powered intelligent shopper journeys, loyalty segmentations, offer optimization, and personalization, all centered around a unified customer data platform. These capabilities should be synchronized with time and place aware omni-channel marketing and digital customer engagement capabilities. When done right, retailers can often see bigger, more profitable baskets, high customer satisfaction, and greater shopper loyalty.
Store Operations
AI powered labor optimization. With labor shortages and increasing labor costs, we can use AI to align our labor spend and labor productivity insights with customer demand for store labor staffing or for ecommerce fulfillment.
Supply Chain
AI powered Inventory optimization. We can use AI to liberate working capital tied up in non-value adding inventory which can sometimes account for 20-30% of a retailer’s total inventory investment. Simultaneously, we can use AI to reduce lost sales attributed to out-of-stock, which can account for 4-6% of a retailer’s revenue.
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Hypersonix is active in each of these key areas working directly with retailers seeking to turn their data into dollars. There are three key things to unlocking dollars hidden in data.
First, disparate retailer data sources must be integrated and unified. Second, successful retailers will have a data driven culture where they seek to empower businesspeople with democratized, real-time access to insights. Third, retailers must seek to better orchestrate and synthesize predictive and prescriptive insights across business functions so that the entire organization can operate with a single version of the truth.
This infographic was originally published by Hypersonix on RIS News.
