
In many industries, Artificial Intelligence (AI) appears to be a buzzword rather than a clear solution to accelerating results. In fact, resources are commonly used to establish what AI can and cannot do — eCommerce is no exception.
In eCommerce, brands are investing in the power of AI. This trend will only increase with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.8 percent in retail and commerce between 2019 and 2025. Whether it’s pricing strategies and product promotions or satisfying the demand for more subtle customer journeys, there’s no shortage of Artificial intelligence applications in eCommerce.
While the use-cases are widely accepted in other industries, in eCommerce, AI allows merchants to add a personal touch to the way they buy their products — and the demands for flexibility and consistency across multiple platforms.
So, how are e-commerce marketers turning this technology from buzzword to destruction, and what can other sectors learn from it?
The eCommerce use-cases
Getting Started with the Most Popular Solution — Chatbots automate community management, customer engagement, and sales leads. According to Gartner, the average person will have more conversations with bots by 2020 than their spouse. Meanwhile, 70 percent of white-collar workers are expected to interact with conversation platforms daily by 2022. AI-enabled bots provide e-commerce merchants with a scalable solution that works around the clock using natural language processing (NLP) to help people find the right product or make complaints. Similarly, they integrate with organizations’ internal APIs to provide visibility into product availability or to help employees with customer engagement.
Elsewhere, AI can help brands build meaningful relationships with their customers by interpreting large amounts of data. When a user visits a website, they leave the trail of digital breadcrumb, most of which is unused. However, AI allows retailers to rapidly sift through transaction data to generate insights from employees’ trends, buying patterns and marketing leads and make them better decisions.
In the digital age, retailers need to contextualize, optimize and reduce search results for their buyers. The AI cookie enables merchants to leverage data and offer customers greater offerings. By using natural language processing capabilities, image, video and audio recognition, retailers can find out what their customers really want.
It is evident that there is no shortage of use cases for AI in commerce. While some may be more obvious than others, it allows marketers to offer seamless experiences to customers, enabling employees to do their work more efficiently. How can you leverage AI successfully?
learn more: Artificial Intelligence In eCommerce
Laying the foundations
Nothing without AI data. It draws intelligence from the vast amount of information available at organizations, which means data science and data engineering are crucial. However, gaining insights from this data is by no means easy and organizations need to make sure they have the foundations necessary to apply analytics.
The problem is that these data are often extracted from fragmented and landfill sources, which means that the data needs to be more accessible — which requires coherent integration structures. What’s more, screening and aligning this data is a manual process and preparing the data takes considerable time and resources.
Additionally, much of the data needed to manage AI requires corrupted insights. Through this, we understand the insights that need to be identified and taken action as value diminishes over time. Therefore, if companies struggle to gather sufficient amounts of required data, it can quickly become useless.
Preparing data is a complicated process, especially when large corporations spread their information across multiple sources. All these must be leveled to give the AI the desired results. As poor data can prove to be harmful, data quality becomes a major challenge for eCommerce marketers to overcome — so, when implementing AI, do the rewards outweigh the challenges?
When to invest
Commerce benefits greatly from AI. Already, we have seen companies create a buying and selling experience for shoppers and sellers — by 2025 AI is estimated to be worth $ 27 billion in the retail sector alone.
Customer experience will become a very important beneficiary of the consequences of AI. With consumer adoption of technology and increasing demands for personalized driving adoption, merchants cannot afford to sit tight. If technology is expensive and difficult to implement, those early adopters will reap.
Whether or not eCommerce merchants can really benefit depends on how ready they are. Before investing in AI, retailers need to think about the business case, whether there are opportunities for exploitation, and whether they have the right data, people and technology.
Finally, there are a lot of preparations before AI can produce results. Companies need to make sure they have clean, accessible and high-quality data from which they can gain meaningful insights — and then they can ride the hype.