E-commerce is a booming industry where personalization is one of the most important elements the industry is dependent on. However, with an incrementation in the competition, companies are constantly trying to deliver customer centric experience to consumers. Artificial Intelligence is penetrating in our everyday lives and not just restricted to information technology. When we talk about business and AI, AI is having a lot of impact on e-commerce businesses. E-commerce business giants are realizing that by using AI they can provide better shopping experience to consumers. Today, AI is said to change the way e-commerce business operate.
AI systems are very much skilled than humans and they have already entered in the field of healthcare, Game Application development field and also some e-commerce business are using AI’s for increasing their revenues. The number one industry that is transformed by AI is healthcare industry. According to data from the Beacon Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, “US$ 400 million is invested by health care companies in the technology, US$ 3 billion or more is projected to grow by 2020.”
AI’s are helping to detect cancer as well. Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are using IBM Watson for identification and application of new drugs. Cleveland Clinic is also taking help of IBM Watson for medical diagnosis.
While talking about e-commerce industry, many companies have started using AI’s for being more customer-centric and for increasing revenues. Some E-commerce companies are integrating collaborative filtering. When one is familiar with Product X, he will also like Product Y which initially he didn’t have an intention to buy. AI is used to fold information from multiple data streams across various e-commerce sites, which helps in recommending relevant products to consumers. To process data in new ways and to derive` a decision many things should be considered and a deep study should be conducted like time of purchase, gender, time spent on a specific page, payment preferences, click trails etc. AI systems need all that data to help the business in understanding consumer’s behavior and choices.
E-commerce businesses have to display a variety of products in each categorized segment for consumers to choose from. They have huge warehouses for storage of products employing people to pick up items and process the order. Walking miles and miles on concrete floors of warehouses to pick up items and process order requires a lot of hard work. So, warehouses and distribution centers have deployed robots that do the legwork in warehouse. The problem of workers getting tired is solved, and authoritatively order picks and fills are being expedited enabling companies to earn more revenue faster. Kiva robots do the legwork and order picking. Humans in the warehouse and distribution centers can stay at one place and process orders much faster.
Hitachi also uses warehouse robot wherein the robot takes goods with two arms and the items are placed into shopping containers. Where repetitive packing is to be done, these robots are best suited. If you want to improve the speed of order picking and filling and emerge as an e-commerce giant, robots can save the legwork and deliver the goods at doorstep.
An artificial intelligence start up, ENIXTA Innovations has launched buysmaart.com. It is a product discovery platform which uses AI to recommend the best phone and also features that one is looking for.Buysmaart.com strides through over one million user reviews, specifications of 50,000 phones, phone variants of around 5000 number and around 1000 phones created by 160 mobile brands to help consumers compare, select and wisely purchase the best phone which suits their needs. One has to pay only for the specific features one wants. All this in a click and that too for free.
With e-commerce industry, most of the payments are made online. However, online payments are still not reliable as frauds do take place. However, artificial intelligence provides fraud detection as well. It analyzes card holder’s usage patterns, spend ranges and flag any action that is crucial not only to retailers but also for banks or any other businesses involved in the transaction. If you are dropping money because of such frauds after deploying softwares as well, then deploy AI offering fraud detection. It gives your company a real time analysis and predictions wherein your company is in a better position to detect fraud and then take necessary steps. PayPal is also insisting on AI Technology for fraud happenings. Due to the deployment of AI algorithms, the company can spot frauds and that too without errors. It has helped PayPal to be ahead of cyber-attacks by intensive analysis of online money transactions and that too real-time.
Before investing in a solution, identify ways in which AI can help you operationally and strategically. This will help you to decide the right AI for the right operation. You should have a set of pre-defined indicators or metrics that are to be discussed with vendors to ensure that the AI solution proposed can help your company to meet its defined goals. Well there are some widely used tools that are used by e-commerce companies to deliver a better shopping experience to consumers.
1. Personal Logic: It enables consumers to short list the products that suits their needs by guiding them through immense feature space. It filters out unwanted products after consumer gives his preferences about product features.
2. Firefly: It suggests products through an automated recommendation mechanism which is “word of mouth” called as collaborative filtering. It first compares a consumer’s product ratings with product ratings of other consumers.
3. Jango: It somehow solved the problem of value added services being involved to consumer’s requests. This kind of interoperability makes it suitable for consumers to compare prices from various online catalogs if they like it or not.
4. Kasbah: It is multi-agent, online and consumer to consumer system of transaction. If a user wants to sell or buy a product, the user creates an agent, gives some strategic direction, and sends to a central agent marketplace.
5. Salesforce: Salesforce is best to carry out predictive sales analysis. With this you can capture the customer first; capture a huge portion of consumer’s spending thereby increasing the revenue of the company.
6. DeepAgent: It helps to leverage business revenues. DeepAgent analyzes data and discover actions that help in incurring more profits. It guides the company’s moves which are needed to maximize the online sales. Speculations associated with e-commerce sales are removed.
This unsparing competition in the e-commerce market will see more attainment of start-ups. The future of e-commerce is with AI included. To excel and be the market player, the inclusion of AI is necessary.
