How are AI and ML changing the E-commerce Industry?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been the hottest topics in the past few years. There is not a single industry where AI isn’t present. AI and ML have become the most useful technologies and are finding their way into almost every industry, thanks to their versatility, efficacy, and advancements.

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What is Artificial Intelligence?

In layman’s terms, it’s the science that helps make intelligent machines, or, that helps build smart machines that are capable of performing tasks and solving problems extremely fast and in a scalable fashion.

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With constant improvements in technology, we have now developed machine learning capabilities in the form of neural networks. This has completely radicalized the industry-standard algorithms and enabled real-time learning and ease of adding new feature-sets for different use cases and tasks in hand.

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Neural networks can now be used to perform tasks that would have otherwise required great manpower and a lot of technological investment such as recognizing faces and images, extracting data from images, and a lot more. The possibility of using it to process unimaginable amounts of data to get answers is limitless!

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How are AI and ML used in the E-Commerce Industry?

Modern-day users have become very smart, educated, and tech-savvy. Today’s new-age data science techniques are useful not only to bring the traffic to your website or the app but also to communicate with your customer and engage them to promote retention and repurchases.

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This is where AI and ML play important roles to make sure that the whole customer journey is being taken care of on a real-time basis. This is being done via Personalisation and Marketing Automation.

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1:1 customer experiences are industry-agnostic. They are the need-of the-hour as your customers' clamor for greater context, relevance, and humanistic marketing. Industry giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have evolved around this using cutting-edge, data-driven technology like AI, Predictive Analytics, and Personalization to provide a superior personalized experience to each customer — by understanding the stated and unstated needs.

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Fashion e-tailer Myntra has also highly invested in AI initiatives aligned across their product, customer experience, and logistics. It has been focussing upon intelligent ways to enhance the user experience by providing based on the customer’s previous searches and purchases.

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At the same time, by leveraging marketing automation, brands can now deliver the right messaging to the right customers at the right time and with greater accuracy, thanks to the ability to better integrate your data, build behavioral profiles, and understand your audience’s needs at the moment.

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E-commerce brands such as The Body Shop, Myntra, Flipkart, Nykaa Fashions, and more are using marketing automation products and technologies using event based triggers that are activated based on how users behave on their e-commerce platforms. These include triggered actions such as browser push notifications, app-push notifications, emails, etc. Thus, not only increasing the probability of purchases but also enhancing user experience to gain their loyalty. We strongly believe that this may become common along with many industries in the years ahead — particularly in B2C sectors with massive volume.

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The combination of personalization and marketing automation using AI and ML is definitely helping change the face of all customer-centric industries and especially E-commerce. This is only the beginning of an evolution.

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How far will humans be able to go with AI? Will it be able to completely replace human capabilities? There is much to be answered and it all depends on how much AI and ML will advance and evolve in the coming years. Right now, all we can do is use the first-generation AI to our advantage and get the best out of it!