How AI-enabled consumer intelligence accelerating brand success

Adoption of AI-driven intelligent automation in the retail and consumer products industries is projected to leap from 40 per cent of companies today to more than 80 per cent in three years. In retail, the highest growth is expected in supply-chain planning, while in consumer products companies the deepest penetration is anticipated in manufacturing.

Retailers and brands are initially using intelligent automation to improve efficiency and reduce costs. As the capability matures, it opens up entirely new ways of doing business that can increase operational agility, improve the quality and speed of decision making, and enhance the customer experience.

Intelligent automation brings with it a new category of risk associated with ethics and machine responsibility. Organizations must take steps to avoid creating biases that can generate negative outcomes.

Brands and retailers are already adopting AI-powered intelligent automation at a breathtaking pace – and that process is about to accelerate. Over 80 per cent of executives in both the retail and consumer products industries expect their companies to be using intelligent automation by 2021, according to our new IBM Institute for Business Value study, developed in collaboration with the National Retail Federation.

What's more, 40 per cent say their organizations are already engaged in some form of intelligent automation. Companies that aren't experimenting with this capability risk falling behind and need to move quickly if they hope to remain competitive.

Why the surge in participation? Intelligent automation represents a major technological breakthrough that has the potential to not just improve, but to transform the way companies do business. In intelligent automation, artificial intelligence (AI) is infused into automation, enabling machines to learn and generate recommendations, and to make autonomous decisions and self-remediate over time.

In the 1990s, the e-commerce revolution initiated a fundamental change in consumer shopping behaviour, which has continued to gain momentum in the mobile and social media era. In the process, customer demands have reshaped the retail and consumer products industries. To meet these changes, retailers and brands have leveraged technologies over the past decade that enable them to stay close to local market trends, understand consumer preferences and shopping behaviours, design products, provide value-added services and engage consumers in contextual ways.

Artificial intelligence has as a capability in machines to reason, remember information, learn and identify new insights through data discovery. Intelligent automation is guided by AI tools that need minimal manual routine interventions. This operational shift augments and assists human capabilities, reduces human errors and builds efficiencies, while enabling digital operations and innovations. Four components make up intelligent automation: the first three are fuelled by AI, the fourth by automation.

Engagement over external touch points where users interact with systems learning from analytics across different data sources and recognizing semantic references to use as criteria for decisions Reasoning from learning to make autonomous decisions and self-remediate over time.

Doing or executing to carry out the next best action that systems can execute digitally and/or that people or robots can execute physically. An AI-powered search engine could reshape the way fashion designers develop new designs. The engine was trained using 1,00,000 print swatches from 10 years of winning entries from Fashion Week. It can search for images with specific elements or design patterns based on image data sets users choose.