Navigating the Next Wave: Generative AI in Retail

Retail is no stranger to change, from eCommerce to apps and in-store innovations to back office automations, few industries have ridden the waves of technology led experience reinvention as frequently and arguably as well as retail.

Retailers and brands like Nike, Apple, Amazon have long been leading the way for experience transformations, across marketing, online, in-store, product, loyalty and more.

And now it seems the next wave of change, powered by generative AI, has arrived and arrived fast! The landscape is advancing at blistering speed and creating new opportunities for retail almost daily.

Whilst it’s early days, we’re seeing uses of generative AI in retail broadly falling across four key areas;

• Customer Experience - generative AI is enabling new conversational experiences (across online, digital and in-store)

• Product & Innovation - generative AI is providing extra creative firepower in the product innovation and management process

• Marketing - generative AI is driving new ways of marketing (and of consumers being marketed to)

• Operations - generative AI is being used as a second brain from augmenting strategic thinking to reporting and creation of insights

Let’s explore some of these fast emerging generative AI possibilities for retailers (note: whilst examples have been provided they are just indicative of the broader opportunities which can be unlocked when combining the power of generative AI tech with some creative thinking).

Enhancing the Customer Experience with generative AI

New online shopping experiences

Shopping experiences (across all industries) are set for big disruption. With a limited handful of ChatGPT plugins already showcasing the big changes about to come, the traditional ‘click, filter, add to cart’ way of shopping will soon feel clunky and limiting.

New conversation centric interfaces and ways of interacting with an online store are already giving rise to new ways of searching and buying products online. The likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft are all planning on scaling conversational shopping experiences.

Things to consider: What would a conversational eCommerce experience feel, sound and look like? How could complex shopping tasks (like advanced filter based searching) be made simpler with a conversation? How could existing ecommerce sites and apps be enhanced by generative e.g. AI assisted concierges?

Things to try today: Try using some of the ChatGPT plugins available today to experience what a conversational commerce experience feels like. Kayak for travel, Instacart for groceries,  BuyWisely for retail products. Whilst not perfect, they give a glimpse into what’s possible. Plug-ins are relatively easy to develop and a good way for a retailer to step into the world of conversational commerce.

Plugins like recipe finder Tasty and Instacart are making it possible to search for recipes and have the ingredients delivered to your doorstep with one simple prompt

Augmenting the in-store experience

Traditional brick-and-mortar is also set for an AI powered shot in the arm. All aspects of the retail experience can be augmented and enhanced using generative AI - from back-office functions such as creation of promotional assets and inventory management, to front of house areas like customer servicing and experience.

Things to consider: What are the in-store bottlenecks which AI powered service could fix? Logging of and updating on customer service requests? Finding detailed product information or way-finding? What are the new experiences which could be created to connect customers with product? In-store concierge services? Providing customers with a personalised shopping experience?

Things to try today: Soul Machines are creating life-like avatars which are powered by LLM’s like ChatGPT 4, to deliver human-like interactions and conversations. Give Nova or the Heineken recruitment consultant a go to explore the possibilities of in-store conversational experience reinvention.

Soul Machines virtual assistants are ChatGPT-4 enabled meaning customers are able to converse, be understood and serviced through AI.

Using generative AI in Product & Innovation

Augmenting the product design process

Using advanced promoting techniques, generative AI text and image generation tools can be used for a number of different use cases in the ideation and creative process. Accelerating and deepening the mood boarding process for example is one use case with brands adopting generative AI to augment the product development process. This can span into R&D, product and store design, collaboration mash-ups and more.

Things to consider: How could a traditional mood boarding processes be supported and accelerated with generative AI? How could an AI creative assistant provide input into the ideation process? ChatGPT powered flows, Midjourney sketches?

Things to try today: Create a Midjourney account and start generating images. A useful thing to try is advanced prompting techniques to get Midjourney to output different styles.

Prompting Midjourney to generate concepts for a L'Occitane en Provence experiential pop up store

Optimising product information management

Managing product information and descriptions has long been the bane of many retailers and eCommerce operations. With LLM’s (large language models) this is fast becoming a thing of the past, giving rise to a plethora of possibilities from automating the copywriting process to tools that will automatically apply and check for brand and tone of voice consistency across an entire catalogue of SKUs.

Things to consider: leverage APIs from LLM providers, like OpenAI or AI21, to build tools which automate and optimise the product information management process.

Things to try today: Tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can be effectively used to create consistent product descriptions and information.

Tools like Jasper.AI are revolutionising the content generation and copywriting process

Generative AI powering a new age of marketing

Asset Creation and Manipulation

The world of image generation has been turned upside down by generative AI and tools like Midjourney, Dalle-2, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly to name a few. For retailers this means the world of expensive shoots and post production can be heavily disrupted with emerging generative AI technologies. Companies like Levi’s are even going as far as to use AI generated models in their product shoots. With AI capabilities now being deployed in tools like Photoshop as well as stand alone tools, like Runway ML, which allows AI to be trained on specific image styles, the possibilities to optimise and find new ways to work with images are as broad as they are deep.. Side note: this asset generation capability is fast emerging to the world of video asset creation too.

Things to consider: Consider current bottlenecks, like creation of image variants, reshooting, editing and how generative AI can play a key role in optimising current asset production workflows, from copy to images and soon video too.

Things to try today: With a plethora of generative AI imaging tools available today, there is no shortage of places to start. With tools like Midjourney and Runway ML you can quickly try training an AI on a particular style of image and to easily create similarly styled images from a single prompt.

Midjourney can be used to help create variations of source images, useful for everything from personalisation to post production editing

Conversational Marketing

Generative AI can create more flexible and adaptable conversational campaigns that learn from interactions with users and improve over time. Generative AI can create responses automatically, with human intervention required only for reviewing and streamlining the final output. These methods can be leveraged to create omni-channel, goal-oriented conversational marketing campaigns. With generative AI, brands can define more nuanced goals, such as special promotions on products or re-engaging with inactive customers.

Things to consider: How can generative AI be used to personalize marketing efforts? How can it improve customer engagement and drive sales? What would a conversational ad look, feel and sound like?

Things to try today: Consider implementing generative AI in your marketing campaigns to provide personalized experiences and drive customer engagement. Start learning how generative AI tools provided by Facebook or Google will be creating new marketing possibilities. Consider developing ChatGPT plug-in's to enable your product on ChatGPT.

Google Ads will soon have a raft of new generative AI capabilities to drive more personalized ads

Optimising operations with generative AI

Better business intelligence

Generative AI can help to automate and streamline the process of business intelligence and reporting. With natural language generation capabilities, these AI models can summarise complex datasets into easy-to-understand narratives, providing more accessible insights and forecasts to decision-makers. This can lead to more informed decisions and strategies.

Things to consider: How can generative AI be used to provide more insightful and actionable business intelligence? Could staff training be improved with conversational training tools? How can generative AI be used to automate the reporting process.

Things to try today: Try using AI tools which automate the generation of business reports and provide insights based on complex data sets. A number of tools are becoming available, including ChatGPT Code Interpret plug-in.

ChatGPT's Code Interpreter plug-in demonstrates the tip of the iceberg in the data analysis space.

Rapid generation of insights

Generative AI is already transforming the way customer research and insights is being conducted, synthesised and analysed. Combining tools like ChatGPT with some advanced prompting, AI can be used to either validate, create or identify gaps in research and insights. A number of dedicated tools, like Yabble are even generating end-to-end customer insights, 100% AI generated and tools like the ChatGPT Code Interpreter are fast providing new ways of interpreting, forecasting and representing data.

Things to consider: How could AI be used to challenge the ways we do research and gather insights?

Things to try today: Yabble, a ChatGPT plug-in is able to create deep customer insights in a matter of seconds.

Yabble is a ChatGPT plug-in allowing retailers to conduct end-to-end customer insights in seconds

In Summary

With so many new possibilities emerging almost daily, it can seem like a daunting task to figure out where to begin. At Time Under Tension we have developed a rapid process to help organisations embrace generative AI technology (Inform, Design, Create).

Interested in finding our more, drop us a line today.