AI eCommerce News - June 14th

E-Commerce Gets the Einstein Treatment

“This is the year that Salesforce is inserting its Einstein AI functionality into all of its products. Salesforce Commerce Cloud Einstein now has its share of technology innovations that enable retailers to provide shoppers with personalized, AI-powered experiences that span Web, mobile, social, in-store and more.

There's a hierarchy of needs that applies to retail commerce customers, noted Dwight Moore, senior director for retail and GTM at Salesforce. They can be summed up as, ‘know me, remember me, make it easy for me, surprise and delight me, and make my life better.’”

Is Ai The Way Forward For Ecommerce Businesses?

“It’s no secret that Artificial Intelligence i.e. AI has been touted as one of the biggest things to change the ecommerce industry. Currently estimated by eMarketer to be almost 7.3% of all global sales, the ecommerce industry is using AI to push the envelope. With increasing competition, all e-commerce platforms need to find smarter ways to engage with customers and anticipate their needs.”

AI Startup Cognitive Scale Gets USAA Backing

“CognitiveScale traces its roots to a number of IBM engineers who had in turn worked on Watson, the supercomputer project that works with A.I. and data analytics.  The company offers CortexOS, which is cloud based technology, to leverage data streams across predictive analytics. Those data streams come from customer sources (known as Engage) and employee sources (known as Amplify).  Unstructured data sources come from social media and other sites and sources including mobile apps and call centers.”

CES Asia: Chinese consumers get new tech first

“In industries like CPG, brand sales are declining, or at the very least growth is stalling. Many brands are looking to ecommerce, which represents 20 to 40 percent of overall sales in China, to drive sales back to a healthy level. This means brands are relying on ecommerce giants like JD.com to help them achieve scale.”

Vendor Research: EasyAsk

Vendor: EasyAsk    

Website: http://www.easyask.com

Headquarters: Burlington, MA

Key Product:

EasyAsk for B2C, B2B, Mobile

Key Features:

Natural Language Search

Voice-enabled Natural Language Mobile Search

Integrations: Magento, NetSuite, Infor, IBM, Hybris

Articles/Posts about EasyAsk:

Trailblazers –Congratulating The North Face on the Creation of the First Voice-Enabled MobileeCommerce App

Clients: North Face, Timberland, True Value, Aramark

Founders:

Craig Bassin, CEO – LinkedIn Profile

Dr. Larry R. Harris, Founder and Advisor – LinkedIn Profile

Data:

- “Our sales per search session increased by 23% when we added EasyAsk to our WebSphere platform.” Cal Bouchard, Sr. Director Of Ecommerce At The North Face

- Personalization Mall's conversion rate exceeds industry averages by 2-3x

AI, Visual Data, Semantic Search and the Fashion Industry

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The war over artificial intelligence will be won with visual data

“Major technology companies and new startups are at war over having the most valuable artificial intelligence and at the core of this war is having unique high quality visual data.

Fei-Fei Li, Director of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab and Chief Scientist AI/ML at Google Cloud says, ‘As nature discovered early on, vision is one of the most powerful secret weapons of an intelligent animal to navigate, survive, interact and change the complex world it lives in…The only path to build intelligent machines is to enable it with powerful visual intelligence…While many are searching for the ‘killer app’ of vision, I’d say, vision is the ‘killer app’ of AI and computing.’

Computer vision expert and Professor Computer Vision at Cornell Tech, Serge Belongie says ‘A majority of the human brain involves processing of visual data, for purposes such as scene interpretation and spatial navigation. Visual data is central to the way we learn about the world, and it follows that the pursuit of intelligent machines will require substantial advances in our ability to process and interpret visual data.’”

Three quarters of fashion retailers will invest in artificial intelligence over the next 24 months

“Two separate research studies, funded by Apptus and carried out by IMRG and Hive, have found that fashion retailers are planning significant investment in artificial intelligence (AI) over the next two years, as they seek to deliver the ‘real time relevant’ customer experiences that are vital to improving sales performance.

- 52% will invest in AI for online merchandising in the next 12 month

- 67% of respondents said AI would help to improve organisational efficiency

- 62% said it would enable them to deliver an enhanced customer experience

- 58% said it would help them to make more effective use of big data

Asked to identify the areas of their businesses that will benefit the most from automation in the coming 3-5 years, scoring each out of 10, they awarded personalisation a score of 7.9 and online merchandising: 7.8. By contrast customer service scored five out of ten.”

How AI Powered Semantic Search Can Increase Your Ecommerce Conversion

“Semantic search uses both Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence to understand long search terms (like chocolate bars under 5 dollars). By using Machine Learning techniques it can also develop an ability to understand the customer’s’ intent (i.e. identify the typos, recognize synonyms, show related products) as opposed to focusing only on specific keywords.

The concept of Semantic search not entirely new. Apple’s Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Assistant use similar technology to understand people’s speech.

Apart from improved ability to present relevant products to the customers, there are many other benefits of Semantic search over the traditional Textual one.”

Alibaba Group Reports Strong Growth in Ecommerce

“Alibaba has also used artificial intelligence to handle the volume of inquiries from consumers through chatbots. As of March, AI technology was handling millions of customer inquiries daily.

During the quarter, Alibaba made its AI technology available to merchants on its marketplaces through a service called 'store concierge.' It uses natural language processing to help merchants handle consumer inquiries such as returns and refunds, especially during peak promotional seasons. It also supports personalized recommendations and promotions and discount information.”