Retail Nation—Shoptalk will be underway shortly, and you are about to be buried under a deluge of…Artificial Intelligence. There is going to be a lot of NOISE out there…a lot of theories and – I’m optimistic – some practical use cases. That said – our view of AI is…well…evolutionary vs. revolutionary.
AI – Already Has a Job
You know, because it’s your craft. You’ve been investing in technology, teams, and your career – all with a common goal…a need that is the essence of retail – we sell more products to more people as profitably and often as possible.
Belying the simplicity of “selling products to people” is the reality that hundreds of events intersect that effort – from customer to logistical, merchandising to marketing.
AI’s job isn’t merely individualization but rather in the recognition of opportunity – storytelling.
Your AI Journey is Retail Storytelling
Some stories are operational – being off (or ahead) of plan or an overstock situation. Some stories revolve around the customer experience – with shoppers engaging with a new product line, missing a continuity purchase, or returning an item due to quality issues.
Storytelling, from opportunity to monetization, is already communicated in prompts.
Yet other stories are Predictive or machine learning based. Stories that include a customers predicted to expand into a new-to-them product category or, better still, a new-to-them season. Managing customer lifecycle is now owned/enhanced by machine learning – understanding who the best Look Alike seed audiences is – through who can be won back from the brink of the brick-and-mortar abyss.
Prompt Engineering (tell the story)
As retailers – you think in prompts. Your description of a specific business challenge. Prompts. Your articulation of an audience to address the challenge. Prompts. As you discuss how you would want to message the unique individuals that are part of the campaign. Prompts. What we lacked was a framework to put the story together.
Cascading Prompts between different AI systems set the stage for the next evolution in marketing automation.
The team at OpenINSIGHTS developed a “cascading prompt” framework that crafts the story of your success. It’s a practical approach where machine learning blends with GenerativeAI (and industry best practices) to understand, react, individualize, mobilize, and monetize.
- BUSINESS PROMPTS – describing a business need, action (or inaction) taken by the customer, a predictive opportunity to be realized
- AUDIENCE PROMPTS – the business needs also define the audience qualities that can satisfy it
- LANGUAGE MODEL PROMPTS – the first tier of individualization understands each unique customer and constructs prompts relative to the business-specific opportunity.
- IMAGE PROMPTS – constructs the image, reflecting the individual back to themselves while still honoring the business opportunity at the root of the story.
- MERCHANDISING PROMPTS—Where appropriate, we will merchandise according to the opportunity theme while honoring the specific customer, their preferences, and their price sensitivities.
Less Buzz (more benefit): Let’s shop(talk)
OpenINSIGHTS has been delivering Predictive Customer Infrastructure as an “in your cloud” technology, well before the buzz of AI was first heard. For the last 7 years, we’ve transformed top retail brands via self-adaptive machine learning – powered by retail’s first (and only) Graph-based Neural Networks.
Our Vision has always been your Mission.
If you feel it’s time to get serious about AI’s role in optimizing the customer side of your enterprise retail business – let’s talk. We have the plan, the path, the platform – all engineered with your profit at its core.
Message me via Linkedin if you’d like to meet at Shoptalk (or really anytime).
