Kicking off Black Friday and Holiday Shopping with Artificial Intelligence

US retailers are making final preparations for Black Friday in both their physical and digital stores to support the expectation of high volume shoppers. 2018 holiday sales are estimated to climb between 4.3 and 4.8 percent over 2017 to between $717.45 and $720.89 billion — all due to the rising health of the economy, low employment records, and increasing wage margins.

While the economy has been improving over the past year, technology has also been making progress — both online and offline. This is especially seen with making more personalized recommendations through the use of AI and machine learning.

AI-Driven Personalization takes priority

With retailers increasingly leaning towards AI and utilizing AI-driven platforms, they are choosing more sophisticated platforms to make more personalized recommendations for their customers, ultimately increasing revenues for retailers and brands.
Some studies even concluded that brands that invest in creating personalized experiences leveraging advanced digital technologies and proprietary data for customers see a bump in their revenue by 6% to 10% — two times faster than those brands that don’t.

For the holiday season, and the upcoming Black Friday shopping, AI can be a wonderful tool used to automate the process of helping online and offline shoppers find what they want to shop for. Shoppers often have trouble finding a memorable gift for friends and family, but do not have a clear starting point — this may need browsing extensively through different e-commerce websites and searching through several aisles in different stores to find the right gift.

AI simplifies this process by giving retailers and brands the ability to ask their customers questions about their gift recipients and offering personalized recommendations based on individual tastes and preferences.
The use of AI-driven personalization for e-commerce channels has increased over the past few years, but according to experts, the future of AI is limitless — especially in the physical store. Furthermore, the future physical retail is believed to be a mix of the speed and convenience offered by AI with a human touch.

Customers want to be engaged through human interaction rather than special effects using light and sound, so retailers can do well to create community events and use data to offer personalized in-store experiences.

In-store Personalization to Support Retail Employees

As more and more technology is being integrated into the store environment, retailers need to move towards an autonomous management reducing the dependency on manual management by store staff. Recent studies even predicted retailers providing in-store recommendations to shoppers through AI engines to be the most mainstream in-store technology in the coming years.

Though AI is often pegged as a technology of the future, it’s a concept that is slowly taking shape and is not too far into the future. AI capabilities enable retailers to pursue customer personalization in real time — which will soon become a top priority becoming important for shoppers. The capability to display prices and promotions, which are subject to change, also coincides with the concept of a more personalized consumer-friendly store.

Conclusion

As we approach Black Friday — the official kick-off for the holiday shopping season, it will be interesting to see in which ways retailers and brands will leverage AI into their shopping strategies this holiday season. While personalized offers and promotions to enhance shopper loyalty will definitely be in the mix in the months of November and December, retailers can also take advantage of the data they receive to encourage repeat business throughout 2019.

Originally published at icecreamlabs.com on November 19, 2018.