This month, Amazon revealed that brands selling on its platform in the US would put AI to work to capture the attention of potential customers.
“For example, they can infer a table is round if specifications list a diameter or infer the collar style of a shirt from its image,” vice president of Amazon Selection and Catalogue Systems, Robert Tekiela, said in a blog post. ASX-listed online furniture and homewares retailer Temple & Webster told its investors during its financial results in August that it is looking at how to use AI “across all of our customer interactions and internal processes”.
Commerce lead for Accenture in Australia and New Zealand, Peter Davias, said brands were increasingly looking to outsource tasks such as product listings, which otherwise take their human workers hours to build and update. The boom in big data, analytics and artificial intelligence has also captured the attention of bricks-and-mortar retailers that are using the tech for everything from produce management to rostering.
However, Davias said price tracking would one day become the domain of artificial intelligence, too as retailers across the globe look to outsource that data crunching to automated tools.