August 26 2024
Remember Clippy, the old Office assistant?
Frustratingly, virtual assistants were once only limited to rudimentary tasks. Nowadays, AI-powered assistants can engage in more complex dialogues. This way AI can guide customers through purchasing decisions.
In other areas, AI can also improve the online shopping experience, think personalised product recommendations, price optimisation, and images with you in your swimwear. In-store shopping has long held an edge in personalization, with staff in the better stores helping out and suggesting what to buy.
New AI software can also deliver bespoke recommendations. Informed by a customer’s behaviour, purchase history, and even social media activity algorithms will be much better to understand the intent behind a shopper’s search query.
For example, if a shopper searches for "hats" and the AI can determine that they have an upcoming wedding, it might return results for fascinators rather than woolly winter hats. To make things easier, AI will create a personalised home page for all your wedding needs.
AI-powered ads will anticipate needs before the consumer is aware of them. Offering you the perfect swimwear for your Ibiza holiday at the click of a button. By allowing you to generate images of yourself in any outfit you like, it can also help reduce returns and improve the shopping experience. While augmented reality will not completely replace the good old mirror, it may be enough to keep consumers on the sofa instead of getting up and walking to the store.
To beat AI-powered e-commerce, retailers and their landlords much continue to find new ways to lure people into their stores. Some may succeed by turning their stores into a place where shopping is combined with social interaction or entertainment—elements that online platforms cannot easily replicate. Unibail’s Westfield malls already offer a wide range of events.
Another way to attract shoppers to physical stores is to build strong omnichannel strategies, where physical stores serve as complements to a robust online presence, providing services such as instore pickups, returns, and personalised advice. British Land’s bet on retail parks is partly based on the ease of ‘click and collect’ and returns. Wereldhave has 'The Point' in its Full-Service Center concept, where people can pick up and return parcels next to other services, such as buying gift cards and taking passport photos. So, there is a future for bricks-and-mortar retail, but it needs active management.
Or more shopping centres could end up with the same fate as Clippy.
Credit – Van Lanschot Kempen Research