How AI is Changing the Retail Industry: Role and Impact with Use Cases

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in retail is changing this industry by playing a crucial role in the various key divisions. From design, to manufacturing, logistic supply chain and marketing, AI in retail is playing a big role in transforming this industry.

Actually, in the age of digitalization, AI and machine learning based technologies in retail industry is providing an automated solution to manufacturers helping them to leverage the intelligence of AI into fashion and exhaust the best possibilities into their field. So, right here we brought a great discussion, how AI is changing fashion and retail with use cases and impact of AI on this industry.

AI in Product Design 

The design and patterns with the right color combination are the key points to designing a costume or other types of products to make it attractive to the customers. AI in retail helps to detect the new trends with demand in projecting the new trend reducing the forecasting error.

Trends in the fashion industry change very fast with new designs or patterns coming every day in the market. Designers need to keep pacing with a new style. And AI algorithms can analyze designs through images to copy popular styles.

And after analyzing the data set of designer products and AI use such data to see what does and does not sell well in the markets and create or recommends designers to build and launch a completely new design in the market.

Retailers giants like Amazon and Walmart now have their own branded products and are using machine learning systems that can identify spots and, in the not-too-distant future, design the trends that customers also prefer to buy.

AI in Manufacturing, Supply Chain & Retail Store

In the retail sector, manufacturing is a labor-intensive industry. Mainly apparel in which from sewing to sorting or dresses, there are mundane tasks now AI can perform with a better level of accuracy at a faster speed reducing the extra cost spend on workers.

AI robots and computer-enabled machines can easily stitch the fabrics with perfection while at the same time it can also detect faults in fabric and offer quality assurance to ensure that the actual design shades will suit the new colors.

Similarly, AI in robotics is integrated into automated assembly lines to manufacture the products at mass production with quality production. AI can produce higher and better than humans at less cost helping manufacturers to produce the products at a more affordable cost.

AI in supply chain management facilitates speed-up by improving routes, and cutting the shipping cost. Using AI companies automate logistic and supply chain processes for faster delivery or find alternate routes for vehicles derailed by unforeseen circumstances such as bad weather or road construction.

While AI in fashion store also uses algorithms with humans-in-the-loop as virtual personal stylists. This AI-based system recommends the best items for them a human stylist picks the final suggested products as per the body types.

AI in Fashion Retail 

AI and machine learning in retail is also providing an automated solution to monitor the customer’s activities while shopping and visualize their sentiments to know what kind of products they prefer to buy and what they ignore.

AI can also track footfalls in a retail shop or record the shopping experience of the customers with the option to get feedback how was their experience while shopping at the retail shops with the opportunity to improve their services.

And visual perception-based AI models also help store owners to keep records of the inventory in their store and also categorize items in the store helping store owners to manage their inventory with AI-backed automated solutions. AI in inventory management is possible with automated robots and other machines to place and dispatch the products from the warehouse or storehouse automatically.

AI in Online Retail Stores for Recommendations

Similarly, just like retail fashion stores, AI is playing a game-changer role in online shopping and ecommerce business. While browsing or searching the fashion items on ecommerce sites, AI recommends other similar items, as per your color preference, budget and other attributes.

Actually, machine learning technology is used here to analyze your filtering behavior and what kind of products you are looking for. Analyzing your search history data it recommends the other suitable items probably you should check.

AI in Visual Search at Online Retail Shopping 

Nowadays ecommerce stores AI-based visual search technology is used to understand the content and context of these images and return a list of related results. You can use your camera to capture an object and search the same online.

AI-based visual search technology allows retailers to suggest thematically or stylistically related items to shoppers in a way they would struggle to do using a text query alone. Actually, the AI visual search model is trained with a huge amount of data sets that contain annotated images making the products or fashionable items recognizable to machines.

And with the help of ML algorithms machines can recognize separate objects within a picture. This enables additional shop-the-look use cases that create cross-sell opportunities for the sellers. While on the other hand, for media companies visual search is an opportunity to transform fashion sites into a personalize shopping experience.

Role of Artificial Intelligence and its Impact on the Retail Industry 

Nowadays, AI is playing a crucial in the retail industry with huge potential to make this AI integrated into various other subfields. It is powering the manufacturers to redefine retail shopping businesses to engage and interact with their customers.

AI-enabled applications and systems are enhancing the customer’s experience that goes beyond personalized ads, notification alerts on price drops, or chatbot assistance. With this kind of technology, fashion brands strive to put customization at the forefront for customers during their buying journey.

Moreover, AI will not only help designers to predict the upcoming trends, visualized by the current fast-changing-environment, but also examine and minimize the impacts on environment while producing the products and fashion accessories.

Further, 3D printing technology is also going to be used with the help of AI. 3D printing will enable professionals to transcend any boundaries of design, as it gives them a chance to turn the most improbable projects into reality.

Artificial intelligence impact on retail and fashion will make this industry more smart and intelligent in understanding the sentiments and tastes of customers. In the long-term, it will have a constructive impact on the entire industry empowering the manufacturers to introduce the most demanding products timely with more precision.

Where as, at the customer end, it will facilitate them to explore more products as per their choice, personality, and affordability with personalizing the shopping experience. Customers will easily find the right products with the option to check products online and using AI-based various other techniques.

Whatsoever, AI is going to play a promising role in the retail industry with more innovative developments to integrate AI into various sub-fields. But integrating AI into more crucial areas of retail is not possible unless machine learning engineers and data scientists get the right quality and quantity of training data to train such models with accuracy.

Anolytics is providing the complete solution for AI and machine learning training data. It is an expert in image annotation services to create annotated images in a large quantity for AI models developed for the retail industry. It can produce the labeled data with the best level of accuracy making AI possible in various fields including the retail and fashion sectors.