If you are in the business of selling to consumers, marketing and artificial intelligence (AI) go hand-in-hand with data science and design. Once again creatives gathered for innovative conversations happening at this year’s South by Southwest 2018 (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX to discuss the latest use of data, design and artificial intelligence for designing the consumer experience.
Prominent consulting firm McKinsey & Company was one of the many sponsors and global experts to facilitate the engaging conversations around AI’s growing value in customer personalization and the challenges of designing fair and inclusive algorithms that can lead to biases against different races, ethnicities, and genders. Two examples mentioned included how an application for a loan in the fintech industry can be evaluated differently based on the algorithm’s designer or a job applicant’s resume can be ignored for gender or age and never end up in the interview pool. AI’s ability to gather large sets of data at the macro level may provide more efficiency for a company by targeting consumer data, but at what cost to privacy? There were data scientist across the panels and in the audience sharing the debate on what AI can and can’t do, including its inability to being able to empathize like humans, but they are working on it.
For the retail industry space, AI has become the way to put the customer experience first and foremost for driving competitive advantage and brand loyalty as the retail industry suffers attrition to e-commerce and less foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores. A new 2018 research study sponsored by Salesforce and written by a team of consultants from Deloitte Digital, “Consumer Experience in the Retail Experience: How Leading Brands Build A Bedrock With Data,” makes a strong case that with big investments in AI and data design, retail brands are actually moving into a time of “retail renaissance” by taking deeper dives in capturing consumer data and finding new ways to engage shoppers through machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality.
AI has been around for a while but how it has been used has not been as efficient as it could be for engaging consumers. One challenge has been that leading brands often use “an average of 39 systems to manage consumer engagement” and have difficulty prioritizing the data and accessing it. Also, the supply chain of talented data scientists to fill the demand is lacking, yet even if there were enough, brands are still playing catch-up on investing in the infrastructure to utilize their talents. Roles and responsibilities definitions, as well as governance and consumer data security, are issues that are of bigger concern before investment in hiring data scientists.
AI allows for massive disruptions in the retail industry through personalization tactics that include pricing, promotions, and search that will eventually include visual search and voice recognition.
The key to success for driving retail resurgence is to bring on a unified engagement strategy over the entire consumer lifecycle that integrates the actionable decision-making among cross-functional teams in consumer marketing, commerce and data analytics. Unification in strategy for brand departments and teams means they must work as an orchestra to provide the right engagement for their consumers through the use of AI, data and design while monitoring and preserving consumer data privacy.
References
Deloitte Digital. (n.a.). (2018). Consumer experience in the retail renaissance: How leading brands build a bedrock with data. Retrieved from https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/e-books/learn/consumer-experience-in-the-retail-renaissance.pdf
Napolitano, J. (2018, March 16). The big conversations on AI and design at SXSW 2018. McKinsey & Company. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/digital-blog/the-big-conversations-on-ai-and-design-at-sxsw-2018
Young, H. (2018, March 19). How to win shoppers in the retail renaissance: New data from 550 brand leaders. Salesforce. Retrieved from https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2018/03/retail-renaissance-new-data.html
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