Artificial Intelligence Has Style

Artificial Intelligence is an online system that can learn behaviour and develop its knowledge on its own. Its designed to recognise and learn behaviours and can be used to build consumer profiles based on their buying and purchasing decisions all contributing to big data. The intelligence can learn and therefore can be used by fashion brands in many ways, looking at a few examples can show the depth of opportunity this trend offers.

Macy’s On-call pilot has been released in over 10 stores across the USA. Through the on-call app, consumers type in their search and ask the app questions in real life talk. The IBM Watson technology receives the question and speaks back to the consumer providing the best answer instantly. Helping them shop in-store, bridges their digital marketing with their in-store experience. Although the use of intelligence is used on a basic level, Macy’s investment to improve store experience may be successful in increasing store traffic, customer satisfaction and overall revenue.

According to Forbes, Dior is ranked first on the Forbes’ 2017 Global 2000 list and therefore as a brand often adopt new strategies to maintain this performance. In march 2017, the Dior Insider was launched as an AI chat-bot. It communicates with consumers firstly greeting them personally with then a series of questions asking them specifics on what consumers are looking for and how they can help. This has been enforced as reports show that within luxury brands 6.3% of website traffic is from social media with Facebook a leading platform. Despite a $71 million research and development cost to improve this customer engagement on skincare and makeup products there is no evidence of this app now. Suggesting a possible failure when launched, it will be interesting if we see this launched again under further development or whether this trend was simply not influential enough to generate enough business to become profitable.

Overall artificial intelligence in the future may dominate many industries. The ability to understand and earn consumer behaviours will create huge advancements in understanding and building individual customer insights. This contribution to big data can be truly exploited by businesses as they are understanding their consumers behaviour in more detail than ever and therefore will be exciting to see how this is used.