In this article…
Technology is pushing the boundaries of commerce like never before. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the primary driving technologies at the forefront of the commerce evolution, using advanced algorithms to revolutionize marketing and personalize customer experiences. As of 2024, AI adoption in e-commerce is skyrocketing, with 84% of brands already using it or gearing up to do so.
This article explores the AI revolution coming to commerce, focusing on what makes AI a driving force for e-commerce in particular, and the ways it’s reshaping how businesses engage with consumers.
Understanding the AI revolution in commerce
AI is quickly reshaping commerce as we know it by democratizing access to sophisticated tools once reserved for large corporations, breaking down functional silos within organizations, and integrating data from multiple sources to achieve deeper customer understanding. It’s paving the way for a future where every brand interaction is uniquely crafted for the individual, powered by AI systems that anticipate preferences proactively.
AI is a broad term that encompasses:
- Data mining: The gathering of current and historical data on which to base predictions
- Natural language processing (NLP): The interpretation of human language by computers
- Machine learning: The use of algorithms to learn from past experiences or examples to enhance data understanding
The capabilities of AI have significantly matured into powerful tools that can improve operational efficiency and boost sales, even for smaller businesses. They have also fundamentally changed how businesses interact with customers and handle operations. As AI continues to develop, it has the potential to provide even more seamless, personalized, and ethically informed commerce experiences and establish new benchmarks for engagement and efficiency in the marketplace.
Four benefits of the AI revolution coming to commerce
Major commerce players like Amazon have benefited from AI and related technologies for a while. Through machine learning, they’ve optimized logistics, curated their product selection, and improved the user experience. As this technology quickly expands, businesses have unlimited opportunities to see the same efficiency, growth, and customer satisfaction as Amazon. Here are four primary benefits of AI adoption in commerce.
1. Data-driven decision making
AI gives businesses powerful tools to analyze large amounts of data more quickly and accurately than a person. Through advanced algorithms and machine learning, AI can sift through historical sales data, customer behavior patterns, and market trends to uncover insights and suggest actions that might not be immediately obvious to human analysts. By transforming raw data into actionable insights, AI empowers businesses to make more informed decisions, reduce risks, and capitalize on opportunities.
As a real-world example, Foxconn, the largest electronics contract manufacturer worldwide, worked with Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab to implement AI-enhanced business analytics for more accurate forecasting. This move improved forecasting accuracy by 8%, saved $533,000 annually, reduced labor waste, and improved customer satisfaction through data-driven decisions.
2. A better customer experience
AI is set to make customer interactions smoother, faster, and more personalized by recommending products based on preferences and behaviors, making it easier for customers to find what they need.
When consumers visit an online store, AI also provides instantaneous help via a chatbot that knows their order history and preferences. These AI-powered assistants offer real-time help like a knowledgeable store clerk. They give the appearance of higher-touch support and can answer basic questions at any hour, provide personalized product recommendations, and even troubleshoot issues. Chatbots free up human customer service agents for more complicated matters, and these agents can then use AI to obtain relevant information and suggestions for the customer during an interaction.
3. Personalized marketing
Data-driven personalization of the customer journey has been shown to generate up to eight times the ROI, as data shows 71% of consumers now expect personalized brand interactions. Until AI came around, personalization at scale was complex to achieve. Now, gathering and processing data about a customer’s shopping experience is easier than ever based on lookalike customers and past behavior.
Many businesses have adopted AI to glean deeper insights into purchase history, web browsing, and social media interactions to drive better segmentation and targeting. With AI, advertisers can analyze behavioral and demographic data to suggest products someone is likely to love. Consumers can now browse many of their favorite online stores and see product recommendations that perfectly match their tastes and needs.
AI can also offer special discounts based on purchasing habits, and send personalized emails with products and content that interest customers to make their shopping experience more engaging and relevant. This personalization helps businesses forge stronger customer relationships.
Personalization across digital storefronts
Retail media involves placing advertisements within a retailer’s website, app, or other digital platform to help brands target consumers based on their behavior and preferences within that environment. Retail media networks (RMNs) expand this capability across multiple retail platforms to create seamless advertising opportunities throughout the customer journey. Integrating AI into RMNs can improve personalization across digital storefronts with personalized, relevant ads and custom offers in real time that improve the customer experience.
4. Operational efficiency
AI can also be beneficial on the back end, enabling more efficient resource allocation, pricing optimization, efficiency, and productivity.
Customers can be frustrated when they visit a store for a specific product only to find it out of stock or unavailable in a particular size. With AI, these situations can be prevented through algorithms that forecast demand for certain items. Retailers like Amazon and Walmart both use AI to predict demand, with Walmart even tracking inventory in real time so managers can restock items as soon as they run out.
AI can automate and streamline operational tasks to help businesses run smoother, faster, and more cost-effective operations. It can:
- Offload tedious data entry, scheduling, and order processing tasks for greater fulfillment accuracy.
- Analyze historical data and market trends, predicting demand to help businesses optimize inventory, reduce waste, track online and in-store sales, and prevent shortages.
- Forecast demand levels, transit times, and shipment delays to make better predictions about logistics and supply chains.
- Improve data quality using machine learning algorithms that find and correct product information errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies.
- Adjust prices based on competitor pricing, seasonal fluctuations, and market conditions to maximize profits.
- Pinpoint bottlenecks, identify issues before they escalate, and provide improvements for suggestions.
Future trends and predictions
If you want to stay ahead in e-commerce, it’s just as important to know what’s coming as it is to understand where things are today. Here are some of the trends expected to shape the rest of 2024 and beyond.
Conversational commerce
Conversational commerce allows real-time, two-way communication through AI-based text and voice assistants, social messaging apps, and chatbots. Generative AI advancements may soon enable more seamless, personalized interactions between customers and online retailers. This technology can improve customer engagement and satisfaction while providing helpful insights into preferences and behaviors for better personalization and targeting.
Delivery optimization
AI-driven delivery optimization uses AI to predict ideal routes for each individual delivery, boosting efficiency, reducing costs, promoting sustainability, and improving customer satisfaction throughout the delivery process.
Visual search
AI-driven visual search is quickly improving in accuracy, speed, and contextual understanding. Future developments may integrate seamlessly with augmented reality (AR) so shoppers can search for products by pointing their devices at physical objects. Social media and e-commerce platforms may soon incorporate visual search more prominently, allowing users to find products directly from images.
AI content creation
AI is already automating and optimizing aspects of content production:
- Algorithms can generate product descriptions, blog posts, and social media captions personalized to specific customer segments.
- AI tools also enable the creation of high-quality visuals and videos.
- NLP advancements ensure content is compelling and grammatically correct.
- AI-driven content strategies analyze consumer behavior and refine messaging to meet changing preferences and trends.
This automation speeds up content creation while freeing resources for strategic planning and customer interaction.
IoT integration
Integrating AI with Internet of Things (IoT) devices could help make the ecosystem more interconnected in the future. AI algorithms can use data from IoT devices like smart appliances, wearables, and sensors to gather real-time insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and product usage patterns. This data enables personalized marketing strategies, predictive maintenance for products, and optimized inventory management. AI-driven IoT data analytics can also streamline supply chain operations to reduce costs and inefficiencies.
Fraud detection and security
There will likely be an increased focus on the ethical use of AI and data privacy regulations to strengthen consumer trust and transparency. AI-powered systems will get better at detecting and preventing fraud in e-commerce transactions, which will heighten security measures for both businesses and consumers.
Chart the future of commerce with Experian
AI has changed how marketers approach e-commerce in 2024. With AI-driven analytics and predictive capabilities, marketers can extract deeper insights from extensive data sets to gain a clearer understanding of consumer behavior. This enables refined segmentation, precise targeting, and real-time customization of messages and content to fit individual preferences.
Beyond insights, AI automates routine tasks like ad placement, content creation, and customer service responses, freeing marketers to concentrate on strategic planning and creativity. Through machine learning, marketers can predict trends, optimize budgets, and fine-tune strategies faster and more accurately than ever. The time to embrace AI is now.
At Experian, we’re here to help you make more data-driven decisions, deliver more relevant content, and reach the right audience at the right time. Using AI in your commerce marketing strategy with our Consumer View and Consumer Sync solutions can help you stay competitive with effective, engaging campaigns.
Contact us to learn how we can empower your commerce advertising strategy today.
Latest posts
The world of healthcare is often left to the doctors, surgeons and scientists. They examine our bodies, organs and genetics, determining if we are healthy and advising accordingly if we are not. This trust is well-warranted, as they spend years studying and practicing to ensure their patients receive the best care possible. However, individual health status is far more complicated than that, and cannot only be restricted to biology and chemistry. There are other factors that impact our well-being that must be accounted for in order to form a comprehensive picture of our necessary healthcare. Social Determinants of Health (or SDOH) are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age that shape our everyday health. They include socioeconomic factors such as education, neighborhood and housing, employment, social support networks and accessible transportation, among others. While not directly related to our clinical health, they still account for, and influence, many of our health outcomes. Take an elderly man proudly living alone in small town USA. Managing his diabetes is increasingly challenging. He had to give up his car eight months ago, so getting to his regular medical check-ups is a struggle. Without ongoing preventative care and maintenance, this gentleman will end up in the ER with possibly life-threatening conditions. If his physician can detect the change in his access to transportation, they can connect this patient to an eldercare transportation provider, enabling ongoing preventative care and thus avoiding costly emergency visits to the hospital. Access to transportation, healthier food, higher education and even parks can be a lifesaving factor in certain scenarios. This means that healthcare companies cannot rely solely on clinical or claims data if they wish to provide the best and most impactful care planning for their patients. They must take everything into account, from education to lifestyle to neighborhood. By looking at all available data, healthcare providers are able to get a more holistic view of the consumer and drive care plans that deliver better outcomes. Unfortunately, much of this data is fragmented and scattered, making it difficult to compare data points and group patients together in meaningful and efficient ways. Experian’s robust data and analytics is used to create more than risk scores – provide the right amount of intelligence in a digestible way to the care teams and clinicians that work with these patients every day. It provides relevant actionable insight into what drives a non-clinical cap in care, allowing healthcare organizations to make unprecedented, personalized adjustments to how they engage with patients’ in a privacy and HIPAA compliant manner. To learn how your healthcare organization can improve health outcomes and patient engagement using Experian data, visit https://www.experian.com/healthcare/solutions/patient-care-management-solutions/social-determinants-health.
NEW YORK, Oct. 24, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian and a global leader in digital identity resolution, today announced a new partnership with Retargetly, a leading independent full stack data company. The partnership combines Tapad's cross-device identity resolution technology with Retargetly's robust data toolset, allowing brands and agencies using Retargetly's platform to seamlessly access an expanded audience across devices, without compromising precision. In addition to reach expansion, Tapad's global, privacy-safe digital cross-device solution, The Tapad Graph, enables Retargetly's brand and agency clients a more holistic digital customer journey analysis, and efficient campaign capabilities like frequency capping and online attribution. At the same time, Tapad will be able to extend its presence into the LATAM region, tapping into Retargetly's existing regional footprint. "Combining The Tapad Graph's technology with Retargetly's platform will enable customers to make holistic, data-driven decisions that increase the ROI of their campaigns," said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "We can now offer advertisers the value of both technologies to optimize their marketing initiatives across the globe by creating seamless experiences across multiple devices and channels." Understanding a consumer's cross-device journey is a marketing necessity. A recent study showed that 75% of consumers expect a consistent experience from brands1. With the number of devices per individual rapidly increasing, digital identity resolution becomes essential to create that streamlined experience consumers crave. "Similarly to Tapad, our goal is to offer marketers a suite of products that can increase the ROI of their campaigns," said Juan Amuchastegui, Head of Product at Retargetly. "In order to achieve this, marketers need digital cross-device identity resolution to gain attribution, acquisition and reach expansion capabilities. We chose Tapad as our partner because The Tapad Graph has differentiated global scale, and privacy-safe measures, which we knew would benefit our clients' campaigns." Santi Darmandrail, Managing Director at Retargetly added, "Across the Americas our clients choose to work with us because of our scale, our precision, and our unique approach to what data can do to transform business outcomes. In that scenario, partnering with Tapad and integrating The Tapad Graph onto our platform was really a no-brainer and we are beyond excited to be making that available for our more than 700 clients across the region." To learn more about Tapad and our digital identity resolution products, visit our identity solutions page. Contact us today! About Tapad Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, Denver, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About Retargetly: Retargetly is the leading independent data solution from Latam. Their proprietary platform processes over 25 billion data events a month and transforms them into actionable analytics that drive business results across the board. The recently launched Retargetly Audience Platform (RAM) is the number one data exchange in Latin America, with over 1000 active buyers and millions of dollars traded every year. Regargetly provides services across Latam and has offices in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo and New York. For more information, visit www.retargetly.com
NEW YORK, Oct. 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian and a global leader in digital identity resolution, and The Trade Desk, a global advertising technology leader, partnered to integrate The Trade Desk's unified ID solution in April 2019. The Trade Desk's unified ID solution's objective is to serve as a standardized cookie ID to help marketers reach more of their audience on the open internet. After an initial six month period, Tapad reports significant adoption rates and enhanced customer results since their joint integration in April. As a result of the partnership, client brands, agencies, DMPs/ DSPs, Data Providers, Mobile Networks and Measurement/Analytics Providers, saw increased match rates up to 38% and more global coverage without compromising precision. With this combined offering, Tapad's global, privacy-safe digital cross-device solution, The Tapad Graph, connects brands with consumers over 4 billion devices globally. "There is a need for digital identity solutions outside the walled gardens that can accommodate the need for both precision and scale," said Chris Feo, SVP of Strategy and Global Partnerships at Tapad. "Through our partnership with The Trade Desk, we are empowering companies to have a comparable digital identity resolution across the open web as compared to the walled garden environments." Over 25 companies who license The Tapad Graph, such as Annalect, Semasio, Retargetly, and ThinkCX, have also included The Trade Desk's unified ID solution as a key identifier in their graph output. "The vast improvement in scale that Tapad has seen illustrates the value digital identity resolution products can bring for brands," said Nate Gawel, General Manager of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk. "We're looking forward to continuing work with Tapad to prove that the open internet can deliver the very same benefits many reserve for large platforms." Adoption of the unified ID solution allows all parties across the supply chain (SSPs, DSPs, DMPs and data providers) to utilize The Trade Desk's cookie footprint to increase their own cookie coverage across the global independent internet. For more information, please visit The Trade Desk's unified ID solution site, or https://www.experian.com/marketing/consumer-sync to learn more about Tapad's digital identity resolution products. About Tapad:Tapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Our one-of-a-kind Graph Select offering enables marketers the flexibility and freedom of choice to correlate devices to varied objectives, driving campaign effectiveness and business results. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About The Trade Desk:The Trade Desk™ is a technology company that empowers buyers of advertising. Through its self-service, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and devices. Integrations with major data, inventory, and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, and enterprise APIs enable custom development on top of the platform. Headquartered in Ventura, CA, The Trade Desk has offices across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit thetradedesk.com or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Contact us today!