Thought starters - How do retailers implement AI? Featuring Miya Knights

We spoke to retail and technology expert, Miya Knights, about how retailers can implement AI across their business.

"Retailers are looking to get the right product to the right place at the right time, and AI is absolutely vital for that.

I'm Miya Knights, retail technology magazine, publisher, author and expert. There's a lot of hype around AI at the moment, particularly in terms of the most advanced branch of ai, the generative AI engines that power things like chat GPT I think the most important thing for retailers to consider is partnering with experts that are really experienced from a basic machine learning perspective. Understand how to use the data and is able to hold the retailer's hand when it comes to introducing new data sources and building AI engines to infer decisions that might help drive efficiencies through the business using these types of engines. We've seen so much disruption over the last few years. I advise retailers to diversify and decouple their supply chains, maybe not have so many single points of failure, and if you're dealing with many more suppliers scattered across the globe, managing those and seeing the performance of those, understanding any anomalies or any interruptions to service, those are the kinds of things that AI engines are going to be really, really important to surface to management going forward.

I do believe there is a difference in the rates and levels of adoption between traditional store-based retailers who maybe have seen their online presence grow rapidly in the past five years, and those existing e-commerce, pure play retailers, because the e-commerce pure play retailers were digital first. They already had to have a real understanding of how to use their data to run their business better, so they definitely have an advantage, I think. But I would suggest that store-based retailers have an
operational advantage when it comes to selling to us as consumers. We trust them all. We see them on the high street, we see them online, and we know that if we buy from them online, we can collect it in store or we can return it in store. There's just more convenient to deal with omnichannel retailers that have a physical presence as well. But as a result, store-based retailers really do have to start thinking about their physical sales estate in the same way that e-comm players have thought about their warehouses and apply AI engines to optimising how they're running their stores and linking their back office supply chain capabilities. I believe that's where we're heading in the long-term, that there won't be a difference between the two. That online will converge with store and store will converge with online."

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