mThe retail industry is in the middle of an AI revolution, but despite its long history dealing with large data sets, the business seems to be lagging in AI adoption. The interplay between store, shopper, warehouse, pricing, and stocking processes and systems has created a complex ecosystem with often well-ingrained ways to manage, coordinate, and connect. But times have changed, requiring new processes. And making those adjustments is hard.
Retailers want to know how best to drive value and meaningful improvements using AI but without breaking the bank.
AI strengths and limitations
Understanding the basics of current state-of-the-art AI approaches provides a foundation for retailers to gain a more comprehensive and reasoned understanding of it. AI is a unique tool with quite a long history behind it. It has inherent strengths and weaknesses which are evident to those schooled in statistics, math, computer science, and engineering but may not be obvious to the uninitiated. For example, most surprising may be the fact that AI is not particularly precise. That is, it can easily be fooled when operating in a real-world environment. Other basic limitations for applied use include:
• AI and related machine learning algorithms require a substantial amount of data to run.
• AI is inherently limited. Where human intelligence can bring both depth and breadth to its processing, AI cannot.
• AI in many cases is still a black box to most people; it cannot readily provide a rationale or explanation of its reasoning or outputs.
Above all, AI’s inner workings are devoid of implicit and emotional understanding and rely instead on data estimation techniques to mitigate this fundamental limitation.
Helping your organization adapt
How your organization adapts to capture opportunities enabled by AI reflects a change model that mirrors the resiliency dynamics in nature. Business units and IT work at different baseline rates, but continually reinforce, interact, and influence each other. These dynamics trace a continuous loop known as Nested Adaptive Cycles.
According to Booz Allen, “AI can help your organization streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and increase productivity… but these and other benefits may remain unrealized unless you support your implementation with the right approach to AI change management and adoption.” Is there a guide to help retailers with a mix of AI use cases and plans? Armed with a Retail AI playbook from Valhalla AI Solutions, retailers can achieve resilience over time, by operationalizing what works, understanding training and skills development needed, and fostering strategic reflection, reconsideration and renewal touchpoints to steer the course into the future.
Valhalla AI Solutions can provide objective guidance to retailers seeking to make sense of AI and how to achieve value and growth. Whether you are an enterprise already on your AI journey, or a company that wants to get started, we can assist with our proprietary AI Audit to help you uncover, prioritize, and deploy applied AI solutions to improve your performance. If you’d like to learn more, set up a meeting.
