By Ellie-Rose Davies, Content Executive at IMRG

AI is transforming the retail landscape, offering innovative ways to enhance the customer experience and drive operational efficiency. This blog explores insights from industry experts on how AI can be used to its best effect in 2024. Read on to discover:

• The growing popularity of AI
• How to balance the artificial with human touch
• Ways to create tailored customer experiences
• Tips to improve customer satisfaction
• AIs role in fraud prevention

The growing popularity of AI

IMRG research supported by Adobe Commerce has shown that AI is becoming more integrated and optimised in the world of ecommerce. Our data reveals that most customers are positively responding to the use of AI in their online shopping experiences, where 86.2% of 1000 UK customers revealed that some form of AI personalisation feature would help them to make a purchasing decision. As James Bentley, UK Strategy Director at Awin notes, Since the launch of ChatGPT4 in April last year, there has been a Cambrian explosion of closed and open-source AI models. These models have democratised mass access to advanced capabilities in conversational AI chat experiences, image recognition, voice recognition, speech generation, and even autonomous teams of AI agents that can plan, iterate on, and deliver tasks. With new models and capabilities arriving each week, many brands, and their development teams, are overwhelmed by the pace of innovation, and unsure of what types of AI powered customer experiences to explore. To a retailers advantage, Many machine learning powered technologies operate on a pay-per-sale basis, offering a low-risk high-yield path to AI optimised experiences. CEO and Founder of ASK BOSCO®, John Readman, also reflects on how The fascination with AI has intensified since the emergence of ChatGPT 18 months ago. However, AI's role as a dependable copywriting tool remains uncertain. We've witnessed numerous missteps, notably the DPD AI chatbot's infamous declaration that DPD is useless”perhaps suggesting that AI isn't entirely foolproof. Amidst this buzz, are retailers overlooking a critical opportunity with AI? AI excels in handling large-scale data processing and tackling complex numerical problems. According to IMRG, online sales are stagnating or declining for most, even as Google raises ad costs and posts record profits. Who is benefiting the most here - the retailers, the customers, or Google? John asks the pivotal question: Is it time to leverage AI to regain control from dominant ad platforms like Google and Facebook?

How to balance the artificial with human touch