Consumer habits have changed, most notably online, due to the increased time people are at their homes. Retail tech is the solution to accelerate digitalization and meet these new needs. There are now more than 23,000 retail start-ups in the world, according to StartupCorner. Let’s look at 10 of them and see how they are transforming the retail sector.
Retailers are facing significant challenges, and adaptation is vital for them to better understand their customers’ behaviors, personalize their marketing campaigns, better manage their stocks, and improve their customer relations…
Artificial intelligence allows them to face all these challenges. From there, it is only a step to say that AI will be the next wave of digital disruption… a step that retailers are quickly taking. In fact, nearly all of them (98%) believe that AI could improve their e-commerce platform, 62.5% of them significantly (Artificial Intelligence & e-commerce, Open Studio study, September 2021).
Wizard, an artificial intelligence-based commerce platform, illustrates this point. It will launch in 2022. Marc Lore (former head of e-commerce at Walmart) is on the board. She is convinced that conversational commerce is the future of retail. The Wizard service will allow brands and retailers to conduct transactions with consumers via SMS.
It’s positioned as an end-to-end shopping experience on mobile, from registration to search, payment, shipping and even re-ordering. The technology goal here is to make it feel like the customer is talking to a human when everything is enabled by artificial intelligence. The firm claims a conversion rate of 35%, 10 times better than online shopping.
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