How Artificial Intelligence will disrupt online shopping
Posted by Manohar Parakh on November 25th, 2020
Introduction
How many of you think that e-commerce is come of age? A friend of mine was telling me how she finds browsing through 80,000 dresses online to find that one perfect dress for a date the most tedious thing to do. And rather prefers to go to one store with 20 limited and options and pick one dress that is the best from among them. The dilemma of choosing from thousands, lakhs and crores of products to find that one particular things has put online shopping at the risk of saturation. In this world of fast entry and exit, continuous updating of technology is a must in any sphere and for e-commerce the ship will soon sink if it doesn’t change its current strategy and include disruptive technology as a part of its growth plan.
Like in every field from Smart Cities to banking and finance, use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting the edge back in online markets. AI coupled with Inter Of Things, Big Data Analytics, Deep Learning and Machine Learning is being increasingly used to especially enhance the customer experience by getting more insights in to their behavior pattern. All major companies like Amazon, IBM, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. are incorporating AI in some manner or the other to get the maximum bang for their buck.
Many e-commerce businesses are already using forms of AI to better understand their customers, generate new leads and provide an enhanced customer experience.
Chatbots
One AI-technology everyone is talking about is Chatbots and related programs. These are those chatboxes that pop up and are eager to assist you on many websites you browse. These can help e-commerce retailers not only assist their customers 24×7 but also quickly collect valuable information, understand behavior patterns and conduct seamless brand continuity.
A study by Business Insider predicts that by 2020, almost 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human. Customer service through ‘conversation commerce’ can be real catch for retailers to integrate Chatbots in their system. Taking on several responsibilities, chatbots, that are essentially computer programs meant to converse with humans, can automate several processes for online shoppers like order processes, shopping cart integration and customer support.
However, these virtual assistants may have reached their boiling point. Proof of fact is that Facebook recently scaled down their chatbot ambitions after recording a 70 per cent failure rate. . In the retail business, inclusion of chatbots can be bothersome for many unless used subtly. More innovative ways are needed to incorporate them without being too pushy.
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