Transforming specialty retail with AI
June 21, 2021
The $15T global retail industry has been rocked with significant waves over the past decade, but the most recent disruption and global health crisis, COVID-19, has caused the biggest shock of all. Within several months, the global pandemic not only amplified differences between retail leaders and laggards, but seriously condensed the timeline available to play ‘catch up’ in digital transformation and e-commerce.
As the longer-term impacts of COVID-19 reshape the retail landscape, hundreds of operational decisions will need to be made even more rapidly across the value chain, and retailers will have to take advantage of new tools and business models to become ever more efficient and less exposed to future shock. In other words, the next ‘normal’ in retail will undoubtedly be digital, and it will increasingly be shaped by adoption of the best tools for such complex decisions: artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies (AI/ML).
Over the last decade, we’ve witnessed AI/ML grow dramatically, with its potential for wider commercial use made possible by falling sensor costs, increasing data management capabilities, and exponential strides in computing power. Retailers who choose to leverage AI/ML to solve critical business problems sooner rather than later will reap the benefits, as investments in AI yield more value as they mature.
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License Type
Open Data Commons
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Data Original Source Attribution
https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/retail-whitepaper/Transformingspecialityretailwithai.pdf
