A Deep Insight Into Artificial Intelligence In eCommerce
Artificial intelligence is a technology that allows developers to build applications, services, and programs with learning and decision-making capabilities.
In other words, it’s an alternative to human activity with minimized error probability and a high level of analytics.
AI development allows introducing new software tools to business, helping improve security, marketing campaigns, optimize costs, increase efficiency, and automate many business processes.
In this article, we take a deep dive into AI and its various applications in eCommerce.
How Artificial Intelligence Works
Before using eCommerce artificial intelligence in your business, you need to understand how it works. It’s a technology that allows you to take your business to the next level.
With its help, it’s possible to react quickly to changes in the market, analyze data, study the behavior and needs of your audience, track reports and the success of the company.
Based on collected data, an algorithm is formed that allows you to accomplish your tasks.
Artificial Intelligence Advantages
Artificial intelligence has a number of advantages, including accurate data processing, working with almost any information, and analyzing a large amount of data in a short time.
The speed of AI is incomparable to humans. However, at the same time, AI development and maintenance are virtually impossible without humans.
The fear of many that AI will replace humans is actually not justified at all. Perhaps some professions will indeed become less relevant, but there will be many new ones to maintain AI.
Another important advantage is that AI, unlike humans, doesn’t need any coffee breaks, it doesn’t get sick or need to sleep. It works all the time and doesn’t make mistakes due to fatigue. Plus, it can be used in places where humans cannot be.
The Importance of Artificial Intelligence for Businesses
AI helps optimize workflows and adjust to today’s realities, conducting plenty of analysis, algorithm development, and image recognition.
The financial world is too dynamic, and not all companies are able to adjust to aggressive new changes. AI allows you to reduce the risks of making poor decisions, identify the development vector, and accomplish tasks that require a lot of human resources.
With AI, you can simplify tasks and improve your business performance in no time. AI tools are based on mathematical data and are able to form algorithms and identify/eliminate problems that may take us too much time to solve.
Research by Appvales.com, artificial intelligence itself includes several sections:
Data science – working with big data, analyzing large amounts of data, and structuring it by developing an algorithm;Machine learning – makes it possible to find relationships between data without using a strict algorithm. Often used for pattern recognition, voice, speech, and diagnostic tool development. Content tools like Jarvis and Surfer fall in that category;Neural networks – often used in AI for business. Their main task is to constantly improve and develop new tools. Used to recognize images, video, speech, and create new data based on existing one;RPAs and bots that partially replace employees. Their task is to automate routine business processes.
Artificial Intelligence for Businesses
This is a powerful tool for digitalization and implementation of new technologies.
It’s used in many areas, including the following:
Finance. Algorithmic trading, bank data processing, risk management, formation of credit ratings, user behavior prediction, automation of communication with clients;Data security. AI is a powerful tool for fighting fraudsters, threat analysis, and attack forecasting;Manufacturing. Production process control, new product development efficiency, process automation, and improvement, equipment diagnostics, route planning, breakdown/malfunction forecast, preventive measures;Medicine. Recordkeeping, analysis of medical data, potential threat identification, based on existing information, improved accurate disease diagnostics, etc.;Cybersecurity. Deep learning algorithms that help detect anomalies in network behavior;E-commerce. Smart recommendation systems for shoppers; Marketing. Targeted advertising automation, development of personalized offers, marketing strategy development, purchase management, etc.;Retail. Supply chain planning, competitor analysis, customer research, warehouse automation;Transportation. Automated control systems for freight trains, human factor elimination, unmanned cars;Agriculture. Agrobot control, accurate harvesting;Sports. Gathering and analysis of player activity, virtual coach assistants, etc.
Watch this video to learn how Amazon is using artificial intelligence in 2021:
In addition to the above-mentioned areas, AI is also used in the following technologies:
Intelligent sensors;Internet of things (IoT), incl. industrial IoT;Natural language processing;Time TrackingMachine vision;Deep learning;Call trackingExpert systems;Text, speech, image recognition;Business intelligence;Intelligent systems of information security;Machine translation;Other technologies and development directions.
This is just a small part of AI capabilities for business. It’s used in almost any area of business and helps solve specific problems. Many companies develop AI projects, offering unique solutions to solve various business tasks. Hiring a reliable company will definitely help you improve your company’s performance.
How AI Is Used and Why You Need It
Artificial Intelligence can be your trusted business assistant and improve your performance in all business areas. Here are a few tasks AI can help you with:
Control and Accountability
AI allows you to minimize the likelihood of errors in paperwork and reporting. With AI, business processes run in automatic mode. Essentially, you get a powerful functional calculator structuring and controlling information.
This is essential for financial reporting, warehouse accounting, and evaluation of demand for goods/services.
Marketing
AI can study your previous sales and research the market to make accurate predictions.
It analyzes the behavior of your competitors to compare your good and bad moves.
As a result, you can develop a competent marketing strategy that is more likely to be successful. This increases company growth, approaching the probability of errors to zero. Artificial intelligence is simply perfect for business.
Speed
In the financial world, the speed of a company’s response to changes is crucial.
Take stock exchange operations for instance. Unfortunately, standard algorithms cannot adapt to new conditions and data on their own without human intervention. AI provides this capability and increases the productivity of your work.
AI allows you to quickly analyze information, evaluate employee performance, and automate many routine processes.
Pricing
Analyzing statistics and making forecasts is easier for AI when compared to humans. It can quickly process vast amounts of data and offer the best distribution of prices. It will help you increase the revenue of your company by several times.
Security
Scammers can also be found among consumers.
Self-learning neural networks analyze customer behavior and detect suspicious transactions so that you can react to them in time.
The result is no financial losses and a system protected against any illegal transactions or hacking attempts. This in turn increases your credibility as a brand.
Moreover, Ai is constantly improving in terms of identifying suspicious transactions.
Related content: Amazon Product Liability Insurance: What Sellers Need To Know
Implementing Artificial Intelligence
Before implementing artificial intelligence in your business, you want to collect the right data, e.g. your company sales in recent years.
This also includes customer contacts, transaction amounts, and products/services purchased. You may already be storing this data in a structured form. If not, you will first need to systematize it to then enter it into a program for processing.
The next step is to develop an AI algorithm that learns by itself. Here you need experts who will teach the system all the necessary actions. The good news is that there are already quite a few off-the-shelf solutions on the market that can help you set up your AI faster.
When you get the information you need from your AI system, you need to re-engineer the technical or business processes that are affected by the AI.
Undoubtedly, this will require the involvement of not only machines but humans as well. However, in the end, AI will help you optimize costs and increase your sales.
Artificial Intelligence Application Areas
Virtual Assistants
The most obvious application of artificial intelligence is virtual assistants.
Siri and Ok Google are not the only examples. Chatbots are also a product of AI developed to help customers of companies from various industries.
For example, many chatbots in the banking industry use speech recognition to communicate with bank customers through digital devices and perform standard operations, e.g. money transfers.
Whether or not to use a virtual assistant is up to you. However, you should know that this is one of those AI tools that will only penetrate deeper into the business processes and everyday life of modern people.
According to Facebook, more than 10,000 companies are developing chatbots. Juniper Research confirms the popularity of virtual assistants: the use of chatbots in the financial sector and medicine can save up to 20 million dollars a year, and up to 8 billion by 2022.
Data Control and Monitoring
Constant control and monitoring of company infrastructure is another example of an area where artificial intelligence is being applied.
Engie (energy company, France) uses drones with machine-learning-based image-recognition software at its facilities. Company drones monitor equipment and examine infrastructure to prevent disturbances.
AI control and monitoring systems are also particularly useful in urban environments. The simplest example is license plate recognition, which is used by municipal organizations.
The government of Catalonia is following the same path by providing its police departments with facial and license plate recognition algorithms.
If you need to reduce the risks of wear and tear for your company equipment, AI-based monitoring systems can help.
Automating Manual Labor
Many people fear that the use of AI in different industries will leave humans jobless. Fears aside!
Technology is helping to automate processes, ranging from sending emails to booking airline tickets. Not only do AI algorithms perform complex tasks faster than humans, but they are also capable of working 24/7.
However, the purpose of highly intelligent solutions is not to replace humans but to make human labor more efficient.
For example, the Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance uses an IBM tool called Watson Explorer AI. The system analyzes medical policy data on surgeries and procedures to calculate payment amounts.
Fukoku representatives estimate that the introduction of artificial intelligence will allow them to increase productivity by 30%.
Predictive Analytics
People want to know the future, and companies want that even more.
AI technology is capable of processing large amounts of data, identifying patterns, and making predictions. Today, we have AI-based recommendation systems for supermarket retail chains that are able to analyze similarities between customers and products to make quality recommendations.
Another example of applying artificial intelligence to business is Expedia, the world’s largest online travel-planning platform, engaged in hotel reservations to vehicle rentals. The company effectively uses machine learning to personalize the travel planning process.
Artificial intelligence performs well in making predictions because of its self-learning ability. Unlike traditional types of forecasting, predictive analytics easily adapts to changes in behavior – when new data comes in, it gets better.
Unstructured Data Analysis
With the widespread adoption of mobile devices, we create massive amounts of unstructured digital content every day: messages, emails, photos, and videos.
AI algorithms help companies deal with this “abundance” and structure data to analyze it later.
Siri is based on a similar principle – spontaneous conversational speech, passing through the program algorithm, becomes structured and subject to further processing.
The analysis of unstructured data has enormous potential for manufacturing and resource extraction companies, which have been accumulating mixed data for years.
Such analysis can also make the job of R&D (research and development) engineers easier, saving time on sorting and organizing data before evaluating it and tracing important correlations.
Robotics
The main area of AI application is processed where it is possible to trace a human algorithm and replicate it.
However, technology has not yet developed to the point where it can do absolutely everything instead of us. Here are a few areas that are still not fully ready for artificial intelligence.
Large technology companies are already able to solve many of the problems of computer vision, motion control modules, speech understanding, organization, and providing access to information through machine learning.
Despite this, today’s companies do not have sufficiently robust technology that can replicate the accuracy of human eyes or brain areas responsible for speech. In the future, this too may become a reality.
Artificial intelligence is a chance to delegate tedious and time-consuming tasks to robots.
Businesses are already following this trend. For example, Ocado (online retailer) has developed a computer vision system and a network of robots to replace the process of scanning barcodes in its retail warehouses. This will help speed up the search and dispensing of the right products.
Surgical and agricultural robots have already made a name for themselves, however, robotization in other areas is only gaining momentum.
In any case, in the next decade, the robot and AI market will actively grow. So why not take advantage of its opportunities today to make a strong statement tomorrow?
Prospects for AI Adoption
AI opens up new possibilities for solving the planet’s environmental problems.
The main risks in this area are related to the safety and control of the technology. Ethical issues and the socio-economic implications of AI must also be considered.
Despite this, new technologies can really help people monitor the condition of plants and animals, as well as virtually influence climate conditions.
Medicine is another industry where the use of AI cannot yet be fully fledged. People do not trust machines enough to allow them to make diagnoses instead of qualified specialists.
However, machines are already providing doctors with tremendous help in examining test results and making diagnoses. It’s quite likely that in the future, machines will only have more authority in this area.
Conclusions
Humanity is expected to store about 175 zettabytes (175 billion GB) of data by 2025. Even today, most of it is generated not by people but by machines, e.g. various information systems, sensors, and the IoT.
Obviously, it’s simply impossible for businesses to process all this information and benefit from it without using AI and machine learning. Especially, considering the fact that amounts of information are constantly growing.
Whatever our future holds, artificial intelligence will be part of it. There will be more machine learning startups and mobile apps, some jobs are bound to disappear, but new ones will replace them.
We have yet to learn what benefits AI can provide. This makes it even more important for businesses to learn how to use it for themselves and their customers.
Author
Dmytro Sokhach is an entrepreneur and the 6-Figure Flipper Club member. He is the founder of Admix Global (web agency) that builds websites, makes them profitable, and sells them as business.
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