Getting Really Smart: 3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Ecommerce

By now, everyone has heard of artificial intelligence (AI) as it relates to ecommerce. This technology essentially allows search engines to recognize patterns and trends in shopping behavior and consequently make predictions about what site visitors want to see and more importantly, what products they most likely will purchase.

There are some definite benefits of artificial intelligence in ecommerce. AI is doing a lot of the work that was historically done by human marketers and merchandisers not that long ago. AI and all that it brings to ecommerce is rapidly on the move.

Here are 3 ways that AI will change the way ecommerce operates.

Getting Personal

Success in ecommerce today is heavily dependent on returning highly relevant and personalized search results for site visitors. Data has proven conclusively that when shoppers are presented personalized search results, the chance of conversion goes way up. It’s clear that customer engagement is the key to realizing increased revenue in ecommerce.

Artificial intelligence takes data from a variety of sources, looks for patterns and behavior trends to make predictions about what potential customers will purchase. This customer data comes from a variety of sources such as visitor demographics, location, gender, what products get put in shopping carts and prior purchases.

These analytical predictions make possible the product recommendations feature found on most of today’s search engines. The more personalized and accurate recommendations are; the chance of conversion greatly increases.

Hearing Things – The Rise of NLP

The next new wave of AI powered technology is NLP or Natural Language Processing. NLP gives online shoppers the ability to search and purchase products via voice command. Through the use of AI and machine learning, NLP chatbots will act as personalized, customer service agents and guide site shoppers to the products they want to purchase. This new technology will be especially handy for shoppers who are not near a computer or a keyboard. In addition, new technologies such as visual search is also powered by artificial intelligence behind the scenes.

Predictive Analytics – The Help We Always Wanted

One of the major ways that AI systems will transform ecommerce business is the predictive analysis help it will give marketers and merchandisers in order to make decisions. AI will automate a lot of decision making that was historically made with human judgement. Since AI can utilize pattern recognition technology, it is able to decipher large amounts of data and then summarize that information into an actionable format for its human counter parts to execute. AI gives human marketers a competitive advantage by being able to use very large data sets for decision making.

AI technologies have changed the way that online retailers make decisions about marketing and merchandising. When it comes to CRM Systems (customer relationship management), the personalization of search results through a recommendations tool is a powerful way to increase conversions. Artificial intelligence data has given online sellers the ability to utilize previously unavailable information to reach buyers and better predict what their audiences will purchase.