Kyle Baker recently suggested that he lacks creativity, but having seen his sales presentations decks, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
When Shopify’s senior solutions engineer must walk through the company’s capabilities with a retail client, he no longer spends hours scouring for “hero” images and stock illustrations. He uses a generative AI tool designed to produce sophisticated visuals in a matter of seconds.
Baker wasn’t mandated to use this tool. It was simply one example of how Shopify has encouraged employees to experiment with generative AI to understand its value — a practice he suggests other retailers embrace.
“We are all learning what AI is capable of,” he says. “When you see how it can benefit the work you do every day, you start thinking about how your business can utilize it from an operational perspective.”
Saif Rivers, Google’s head of Big Box Retail, says many of his clients are reaching the same conclusion after running projects that show how transformative AI can be.
“We’ve seen customer examples where, within the first three weeks of a small-scale deployment, they’ve proved both that the AI use case is impactful and that their teams are capable of adapting to the process changes that come with it,” Rivers says. “That’s when they start to accelerate the deployment across the business as a whole, to deliver impact at scale.”
There are many ways retailers can harness the power of AI. Baker and Rivers have offered some advice.
Consider the network effects of AI adoption
It’s only natural that retailers focus on what’s happening in their own organization, but Rivers says it’s a good idea to remember that AI adoption tends to happen at an industry level. This means that the customer experience bar may already be rising and that as a retailer, you don’t want to get outpaced by the competition.
“The next-best experience that a consumer has when shopping becomes the minimum expectation that consumer has from every other shopping experience,” Rivers says. “If I’m a customer of a grocery store that uses AI to provide me with a great real-time delivery service, I would expect that capability absolutely everywhere and would be disappointed when it is not being offered by other grocery stores.”
Look beyond common use cases
Most retailers are becoming familiar with how AI can assist across the customer life cycle — from product discovery through to smart recommendations and customer support — by leveraging chatbots for common questions. Baker suggests they could be even more ambitious.
Consider, for example, a shopper who often buys clothes online but discovers they’re the wrong size once they arrive. Imagine, he says, a service whereby customers opt in to provide sizing information and the retailer uses that data to ensure that tailored clothing fits.
“AI can take us to that point where the experience that you’re providing to customers is like nothing they’ve ever seen before,” Baker says. “You have to start mapping that.”
Clarify objectives to avoid ‘science experiments’
Rivers says the most successful retailers he’s worked with tend to know their AI goals. They’re not running the equivalent of science experiments but trying to solve discrete business problems that impact their operating metrics. Even internal use cases such as AI-supported code generation can significantly impact key performance indicators (KPIs) such as employee retention. For example, in this specific use case, developers who do not have to undertake monotonous work tend to be happier employees.
Successful retailers are data-driven in how they think about measuring the results of AI adoption and about ways to ensure that the tools are fueled with accurate, up-to-date data.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach,” Rivers says. “You have to think about the art of the possible when it comes to transformative technology, especially generative AI, because it fundamentally changes the way that humans and the tools they use interact.”
Shopify and Google Cloud are working together to help retailers make the best use of their data. Learn more about Shopify’s high-performance platform and all the ways you can use it with Google Cloud Marketplace.