If you’ve used the internet or interacted with Alexa lately, you’ve come in contact with some form of artificial intelligence (AI). And if you’ve chatted with Pizza Hut via Facebook Messenger, you’re interacting with a bot. While it may seem strange, chatbots and AI assistants are integrating into our personal lives faster than we might believe.
So what does this mean for you as a marketer? Not only will AI affect several industries, including health care and marketing, it will also change the overall shopping experience. According to Google, 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches. For retailers, this opens up an opportunity to target and connect with consumers in ways that appeal to them.
Consumers spend an average of five hours per week making online purchases; over 96 percent of Americans shop online, allocating an average 36 percent of their shopping budgets to ecommerce. With the shift to online shopping, retailers need to figure out how to connect with their consumers and still create a meaningful experience in order to continue to drive store visits.
AI-powered assistants can also infuse personality into the shopping experience. As traditional brick-and-mortar shopping transitions online, consumers are losing out on the personal touch of store associates and friendly faces. Instead, they search a website on their own, often having to evaluate their purchases without a helping hand. Having a chatbot or AI-powered assistant on a website recreates the store experience for shoppers right in their living room.
A key challenge for retail is managing inventory levels, which is one place AI can be helpful. Ideally, you have the right amount of product available to meet consumer needs, both online and offline. If you are out of stock, there’s potential for upsetting and losing a customer. If you have too much inventory, money is wasted that could be used elsewhere. Letting customers know an item is in stock is beneficial for businesses, especially retailers, that carry items that have a high demand. IBM Watson is working with brands to analyze purchase rates and consumer behavior to help manage and monitor the right inventory levels and avoid out-of-stocks.
We’re not at the point yet where we have one ultimate virtual assistant. Marketers need to figure out which of the many AI assistants in the market they should commit resources and time to. Alexa, Google, and Siri all have their strengths and weaknesses, and there will still be a lot to play out in the year ahead.
It’s time for marketers to optimize their strategies for both local and AI-powered search. According to ComScore, half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.
