What if your inventory could talk to you and tell you exactly what your customers want? Or use customer information to deliver personalised experiences at every step of the customer journey? That’s the power of Artificial Intelligence in retail. By harnessing AI, retailers can dive deep into their customer behaviour. Predicting end-customer desires, helps businesses curate experiences that feel personal and increase customer engagement.
Advanced analytics and AI are rapidly transforming the retail industry, revolutionising the way retailers operate and interact with customers. In India, conversational chatbots are fast becoming the norm as more and more businesses adopt generative AI. However, the future of customer experience lies in delivering immersive, personalised experiences at scale across the entire customer journey, from product discovery to post-purchase support. This is what AI can do for retailers and ecommerce businesses. With small action models, built to perform specific tasks, AI agents can vastly improve CX — both at the front and back end.
Retailers often struggle with managing day-to-day operations while also trying to focus on growing their business. AI Agents are invaluable in performing day-to-day operations by handling administrative tasks. These may include scheduling appointments, inventory management, understanding customer expectations and preparing reports or documents. By delegating these time-consuming tasks to AI agents, retailers can have employees dedicate their time to more meaningful work of innovation and developing strategies that can enhance digital experience, which impacts their bottom line directly.
Unlike generative AI, which is prone to hallucinations, small action models built on Large Agentic Frameworks are far more accurate and effective, making it the perfect choice for retailers looking to adopt AI. Since Large Agentic Frameworks make way for retailers to deploy as many AI agents as they want, AI can also act as an analyst, understanding large volumes of customer data, and predicting future customer behaviour. For example: AI Agents can be built to predict outcomes based on the customer’s usage patterns, enabling businesses to be proactive in solving customer problems.
With personalisation being an important factor that determines customer loyalty. This is because 60% of customers trust products and services recommended by generative AI and more importantly, 59% want personalised recommendations from AI that align with their personality. AI agents can act as a personal shopping guide, as they analyse customer history, preferences, and interests and identify buying behaviour. This makes it the perfect tool to recommend products or services that the customer may be interested in. It can also be deployed as a customer service agent and provide conversational and personalised experiences at scale, while allowing humans to tackle more complex customer issues.
AI is already helping retailers to gather, analyse, and interpret vast amounts of data, enabling them to make more informed decisions and improve the overall customer experience. In fact, businesses that have adopted AI, were able to significantly increase their market share compared to their counterparts that didn’t. It’s time for retailers to adopt such solutions or they risk losing out to competitors.
The author is the CPO & Co-Founder, KOGO.