A few years ago, I received Retail Therapy: Why The Retail Industry Is Broken – And What Can Be Done To Fix It for free. I tore out the chapter on Artificial Intelligence and donated the book for recycling. Upon realising that Spectra Secondary has a Retail and E-commerce course, I was motivated to summarise the key takeaways from the AI chapter. Knowing these should help our students in one way or another 👇
Artificial Intelligence
Virtual assistants
- Alexa on the Amazon Echo speaker, Google Assistant on the Google Home smart speaker, Siri on Apple iPhones & Microsoft’s Cortana
- Employ voice-activated commerce aka Conversational Commerce (C-Commerce)
- Help us buy and pay for things
Virtual Reality (VR)
- Enhances the e-commerce experience by enabling customers to interact with the product in creative ways
- Facebook is experimenting with their Oculus Rift headset to create online VR experiences
- Stores are likely to create online staff avatars that will interact intelligently with customers’ avatars in VR shops
Augmented Reality
- Virtual images superimposed on real images to enhance the level of the user’s experience
- L’Oreal Makeup Genius takes a video of a customer and shows her how their lipstick looks on her own lips on a mobile device
- Magic Leap —> shows a huge whale leaping out of the water in the gym in front of an audience of children
Chatbots
- intelligent programmes that engage with customers in a user-friendly way to assist in the online purchasing process
- Brands like Starbucks, Sephora and Whole Foods have launched chatbots on Messenger which mimic human conversations in an informal style, helping people with online ordering
- Science of Haptography (digitalising touch). Katherine Kuchenbecker designs robotic systems that allow someone to touch virtual objects as though they were real and within reach, using electromechanical sensors and actuators with high-speed computer control, which combine to re-create the human sense of touch
- Olfactics. David Edwards invented an app called oNotes, which enables people to send olfactory messsges. It has over 300,000 scents based on combining 32 core smells. The oNotes can then be experienced via an ‘olfactory speaker’ - Cyrano - commercialised by Vapor Communications
