Artificial intelligence beats a path to e-commerce

Featured in Forbes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made its way into many aspects of our lives, even into toys for kids like Anki’s Cozmo which resembles a roboticized Ewok. But as things go, AI isn’t just for devices, it’s made and continues to make it’s way into eCommerce and is out there working to determine what to sell to you, how you shop and ensure you have a good shopping experience.

According to Gartner by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human and at the close of 2018, customer digital assistants will recognize customers by face and voice across channels. Investment-wise, in 2014 there were more than $300 million in venture capital invested in AI startups according to Bloomberg. Brands are on board and are using AI to build smarter platforms they hope will create a better online shopping experience for the consumer.

SiteZeus pegs itself as a location-intelligence platform. They use big data and machine learning to recommend the ideal retail location for brands.

AI has had a great impact on the retail eCommerce customer experience. We’ve seen a large advancement in the past decade, but we’ve not even scratched the surface,”

said Keenan Baldwin, co-founder, SiteZeus. “Online retailers are scrambling to partner with or adopt new AI technologies to help facilitate customer interaction to try and match and even surpass the typical in-store experience.”

It’s difficult to compare physical in-store interaction to eCommerce interaction because they’re extremely different. The in-store experience gives you things you can touch, hold, taste, try on. eCommerce is limited in the physical world, but AI in eCommerce could help change that experience.

There may not be physical employees to speak to and ask questions to, but there are chat robots, or “personal shoppers” that will aid you through the sales process. They’re intuitive, savvy and constantly learning from you,”

said Baldwin. “AI has begun to do what loyalty programs have not. They’re building loyalty by understanding individual customer’s needs, timing, price-elasticity, and channel-preference. Retailers will know what their customers’ needs are even before they do.”

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