How to stay ahead with retail generative AI
Generational AI is a major technological advance. Its impact on individual and business productivity is remarkable, like the internet or cell phone. Indeed, 82% of companies exploring or implementing generative AI believe it will transform their sector (Google Cloud Gen AI Benchmarking Study, July 2023).
Retailers are seeing the value of generative AI. Organisations are using generative AI to allow and improve use cases in relevant fields, transforming employee and consumer experiences.
Never let technology take away your value proposition or retail’s main value chain. How you use this technology to empower your teams to operate more productively and meaningfully can change. You may strengthen key offerings, eliminate basic obstacles that prevent them from being delivered, and unleash new points of distinction for your retail firm with the proper technologies.
What makes generative AI revolutionary
Despite the hoopla, generative AI offers a new revenue stream for retail and other company executives. What distinguishes it from other AI?
Basically, generative AI makes solving personal and professional challenges easier than before. Anyone who can use a search engine may use everyday language to communicate with a generative AI chatbot or virtual agent to answer inquiries, create content, produce graphics, summarise papers, and more.
Leading firms use generative AI to solve common, time-consuming challenges. McKinsey estimates that customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D will generate 75% of generative AI’s value.
Google Cloud’s generative AI technology allows us to offer a truly differentiated, faster, and frictionless customer experience while allowing our employees to focus on making great food and building fan relationships that keep them coming back.
5 ways generative AI will change shopping
Retail transformation goes beyond necessity. It’s race.
Your clients want real-time suggestions, subscription models, autonomous storefronts, on-demand delivery, seamless omnichannel shopping, shopping assistants, customised deals, and more. Generative AI can help you meet these goals and improve employee productivity and experience.
These five retail uses of generative AI are powerful:
1. Creative help
Generative AI is helping retailers deliver engaging, personalised, and creative content faster and cheaper to 73% of retail customers who expect companies to know their preferences.
Using generative AI to swiftly prototype and generate content saves time and money and boosts creativity and innovation. Google Cloud lets you use generative AI to produce personalised, relevant content for specific audiences, improving engagement and conversion. You may also quickly test and refine new ideas, build strategy, and engage customers.
2. Conversational trade
Generative AI for conversational commerce is helping retailers construct virtual stylists to help customers find what they need (e.g., “Here are some dresses in your size and style you may like, and images of influencers for style inspiration”) to boost sales. By answering questions, making personalised product recommendations, and interacting with customers in real time, stylists can influence buying decisions.
It solves search abandonment well. Retailers worldwide lose approximately $2 trillion annually due to this issue, and just 1 in 10 buyers find what they want using a retail website’s search function.
3. Product catalogue management
Generational AI changes how merchants create and manage product catalogues. Simple text prompts can create studio-quality photos, expedite classification, and generate customer-centric marketing content.
It’s suitable for catalogue management issues like vendor image retrieval, product categorization, and product copywriting. These things previously took time and effort and hindered retail website searchability. A searchable catalogue is essential since 92% of buyers are more likely to buy a product they can find.
This demo shows how businesses are utilising generative AI to speed up product catalogue management and improve shopping and search.
4. New product development
Using generative AI, product creation and innovation can be faster and cheaper. It accelerates research to identify insights across many data sources, reduces R&D expenditures, and identifies profitable product concepts faster. Easy querying, summarization, and insight creation improve internal consumer research. Additionally, you may swiftly produce copy concepts and claims for testing and graphic concepts for product and packaging designs.
5. Automating customer service
Generative AI can help you scale and optimise other activities and support your customer care reps in real time with helpful solutions to consumer inquiries. For instance, virtual agents can relieve contact centre load. You may summarise discussions and customer service data to create fresh FAQ material for your website.
Generative AI lets you provide outstanding customer service across all touchpoints, from digital self-service to agent-supported alternatives in branches, call centres, and social media, where 75% of customers use multiple channels.
Generative AI can provide rapid, humanised customer care to help clients locate answers quickly.
Leading brands benefit
Some of the world’s biggest corporations are using generative AI to improve consumer experiences.
Wendy’s is testing generative AI takeaway windows in Ohio to free up staff to focus on customer service.
The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. and Google Cloud use generative AI to improve online beauty shopping.
Utilise generative AI immediately
Generative AI moves quickly, making it challenging to stay up. Google Cloud, a major partner to the retail industry, helps design frameworks, tools, and governance structures to promote responsible AI use organization-wide.
With generative AI, your retail company can simplify product onboarding, categorization, search labelling, and marketing while personalising consumer experiences. To drive conversions, your teams may develop specific product attributes for new SKUs, tie them to existing product hierarchies, and create marketing copy, product descriptions, photos, videos, and even music using simple text prompts.
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