AI is the theory and development of computer systems capable of performing tasks that require human intelligence. AI combines the power of various technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) along with many more supporting technologies. Thereby, leveraging the AI technology to perform numerous functions, such as product planning, sales management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), visual search, web content optimization, Supply Chain Management (SCM), price optimization, and payment services management.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) in retail market is expected to grow from USD 993.6 Million in 2017 to USD 5,034.0 Million by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 38.3%. Factors such as increasing necessity for surveillance and monitoring at a physical store, growing awareness, and application of AI, enhanced user-experience, improved productivity, Return on Investment (RoI), maintaining inventory accuracy, and supply chain optimization are driving the global Artificial Intelligence in retail market.
The report provides detailed insights into the global Artificial Intelligence in retail market, which is segmented by type, technology, solution, service, deployment mode, application, and region. In the types, the online (eCommerce) retail market will have the largest market share during the forecast period. The online retailing includes buying and selling of FMCG, CPG, apparels, electronics goods, and other forms of life essentials. It excludes entertainment and travel services offered online. Contrary to the brick-and-mortar stores, customers no longer have to stand in long queues to buy their preferred goods. They can purchase them easily through mobile applications and websites, sitting comfortably in their homes or offices. The AI-based solution are majorly adopted by the online retailers to target the customer, who want to shop from the comfort of their homes.
Among solutions, product recommendation and planning is expected to hold the largest market share and is expected to continue its dominating position during the forecast period. Product recommendation is a very powerful aspect of the overall shopping cycle for any shopper. eRetailers are using AI to give a personalized experience to their customers and give recommendations on products they would like to purchase by showing relevant products. Moreover, machine learning and deep learning technology will remain the most significant technology contributing highest revenue compared to other technologies.
Whereas, the in-store visual monitoring and surveillance application is expected to have the highest growth rate during the forecast period. AI for video surveillance analyze the images in order to recognize humans, vehicles, or objects by using computer software programs. This can help in curbing the issue of shoplifting which is one of the major reasons to incur financial loss in stores. The cloud deployment model is expected to exhibit a higher market share, due to the rising demand for 24*7 availability of accessible information and low-cost maintenance services.
The report covers all the major aspects of the Artificial Intelligence in retail market and provides an in-depth analysis for major countries across the regions of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America, owing to the early adoption of new and emerging technologies and the presence of the major industry players, is expected to dominate the market in terms of market size, throughout the forecast period. The APAC region is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period, owing to the growing adoption of AI-based solutions and services among retailers.
The issues related to diverse development framework, models, mechanisms in AI, privacy concern, and lack of skilled staff are some major challenges faced by the retail users deploying AI, which needs to be enhanced to improve the growth of the Artificial Intelligence in retail market.
The AI in retail ecosystem comprises vendors such as IBM (US), Microsoft (US), Amazon Web Services (US), Oracle (US), SAP (Germany), Intel (US), NVIDIA (US), Google (US), Sentient Technologies (US), Salesforce (US), and ViSenze (Singapore). Other stakeholders of the Artificial Intelligence in retail market include vendors, research organizations, network and system integrators, AI managed service providers, Business Intelligence (BI) solution providers, marketing analytics executives, third-party providers, and technology providers.
Vendors who fall into this category receive high scores for most of the evaluation criteria. They have a strong and established product portfolio, and a very strong market presence. They provide mature and reputable Artificial Intelligence in Retail solutions. They also have strong business strategies. Microsoft, IBM, Google, Salesforce.com, Intel, SAP, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services are some of the vendors who fall into the visionary leaders’ category.
They are established vendors with very strong business strategies. However, they are low in their product portfolios. They focus on a specific type of technology related to the product. SAMSUNG, Infosys, Wipro, NVIDIA, Nuance Communications, MicroStrategy, IPsoft, and Happiest Minds are some of the vendors who fall into the dynamic differentiators’ category.
Innovators in the MicroQuadrant are vendors that have demonstrated substantial product innovations as compared to their competitors. They have a much-focused product portfolio. However, they do not have a very strong growth strategy for their overall business. Inbenta Technologies, Narrative Science, Sentinent Technologies, Manthan Software Services, Appier.com, and Dynamic Yield are some of the vendors who fall into the innovators category.
They are vendors with niche product offerings and are starting to gain their position in the market. They do not have much strong business strategies, as compared to other established vendors. They might be new entrants in the market and require some more time before getting significant traction in the market. Optoro, Daisy Intelligence, and ViSenze are some of the vendors who fall into the emerging companies’ category.
Artificial Intelligence in Retail
Analysts 
The company has developed an artificial intelligence system based on reinforcement learning which delivers businesses to turn around declining or flat same-store sales in retail, and finance companies looking to minimize growing fraud and credit losses. They have developed a new category of artificial intelligence which empowers category management and delivering disruptive financial benefits to retails.
Samsung solutions help retailers improve the entire customer journey from pre-purchase engagement through a transaction to after-purchase fulfillment. The company uses technologies which let retailers know, influence, and manage their customers better. Samsung helps in making effective marketing decisions and enhancing store management based on customer behavior. The company uses the best features of data analytics to reach audiences and specific customers. Samsung’s mobile-based Omni-Channel Solution improves customer satisfaction, in addition, helps in improving store employees’ productivity while delivering store- and chain-level efficiencies.
MicroStrategy introduces additional ways to turn insight into impact. It helps in blending and analyzing all data and leverage third-party systems and existing investments. It helps in deploying powerful applications at scale and deliver a single version of the truth across the organization. MicroStrategy delivers the tools that developers, architects, and administrators need to simplify and accelerate processes at every level of an analytics deployment from creating the object-oriented infrastructure to building and distributing world-class intelligence applications, to monitoring and managing the full life cycle of any project. With the broadest range of reusable objects, combined with a highly scalable in-memory architecture, MicroStrategy makes it easy to deliver personalized analytics to thousands of users across the enterprise with just a small team.
Infosys commissioned independent research to investigate the approach and attitudes that senior decision makers in large organizations. The adoption and use of AI technology represent an exciting leap forward for many in the retail sector. Infosys is helping the retail sector to drive customer-facing aspects of businesses as well as automate the increasing merchandized and growing supply chain backend that enables web-based sales and physical retail supply. Retailers use data analytics to inform decisions and recommendation using AI algorithms and previously unrealized data asset value. Infosys partners with retail enterprises to redefine customer experience, renew processes, and amplify the technology. Infosys digital ecosystem enables retailers to better serve customers online and in-store.
Inbenta supports businesses increases the quality of customer care without sacrificing time to redundant user queries. With Inbenta, agents can focus on only the most critical issues and distracts everything else to their chatbot and semantic search tools for seamless, 24/7 online support. The Inbenta chatbot understands customers in their natural, colloquial language. Using semantic technologies, they are able to match customer queries to existing FAQs/answers with 80-95% accuracy, without relying on keywords or exact phrase matches. Inbenta delivers solutions to customer issues in real-time as they type their problems into the support request forms which allows them to solve user issues. Inbenta’s results are easy to deploy, improves customer satisfaction, decreases support costs, and increases revenue.
Wipro enables process and technology transformation and provides innovation ecosystem that allows retailers to experience new technology and business paradigms. Many of the top retailers across the world leverage Wipro’s technological and retail expertise to gain agility and reimagine shopping journeys deploying our capabilities in design thinking, analytics, system integration, product engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and business support. Wipro provides retail clients with the ability to initiate and maintain meaningful real-time conversations with end customers. Wipro's solutions leverage user-centric design, hyper-personalization, and associate centric tools. Its solutions enable business processes and underlying systems to enable dynamic pricing and promotions, analytics and cybersecurity.
Nuance has the technology to offer shoppers on any channel the same level of helpful customer service they expect when they interact with staff in your store. The company offers omnichannel customer experience approach, which prevents cart abandonment and increases customer engagement no matter how they shop and where they are in the process. Nuance services deliver self-service solutions that improve the customer experience while lowering costs. The company helps in increasing order value and decreasing abandonment, it also helps in decreasing operational cost.
Happiest Minds’ Retail Solutions and Services combines with retail analytics and drives Digital Transformation. The retail solutions have enriched the end-customer experience and improve business efficiency through an integrated set of disruptive technologies like mobility, big data analytics, security, cloud computing, social computing. Happiest Minds Pricing and merchandising Cognitive Solution offers automated and data science-driven approach for price review and retail price management across multiple channels to large retail enterprises. These solutions enable retailers to maximize sales, reduce manual effort, drive profits, and build customer trust by leveraging powerful insights.
Dynamic Yield is an AI-powered omnichannel personalization engine, serving a portion of the world's driving brands increase income by automatically personalizing each customer interaction across the web, mobile web, mobile apps, and email. The company’s unique technology combines data and activation in a single platform, allowing enterprises to onboard data from every touch point along the consumer journey and take instant action via personalization, recommendations, automatic optimization, and real-time messaging.
Narrative Science allows customers to understand and act on key business metrics, helping in making better decisions and focusing on higher value tasks. Using AI-powered technology, Narrative Science surfaces explains and contextualizes what is most interesting and relevant. Narrative Science analytical framework analyses data to discover valuable information and surfaces only the most meaningful insights.
Manhattan predicts retailers establishing a presence, dynamic innovations, wider adoption of artificial intelligence and AR/VR technologies. The company is an omnichannel customer service which provides services for the retail industry. It provides retailers to meet the demands of the customers with a personalized, streamlined and consistent service experience irrespective of the channel. The company focuses on artificial intelligence and has the potential to have a huge impact on customer service expediency, particularly where it can plug into a retailer’s data on enterprise inventory and its customers.Manhattan’s new solution leverages the latest in RFID technology to help stores improve inventory accuracy, enhance operations and fulfill orders with better level of efficiency
Appier is a customer engagement platform that enables to engage audience based on customers behavior inside and outside of app or website environment. It helps in leveraging artificial intelligence to increase conversions across devices on marketing owned channels. It is a data science platform that unifies and enriches existing customer data to help better understand the audience and run AI models easily to predict their future actions. The company helps in predicting customer behavior and cost-effective bidding price based on user behavior.
6sense’s mission is to strengthen marketing and sales teams with 100 percent visibility into buyers end; who they are, needs and timing. 6sense offers marketers with omnichannel connectivity and visibility from brand to demand to revenue. 6sense forecasts power all downstream sales and marketing systems with intelligence on who is in the market to buy, what products, when they will buy and where they are in the buyer’s journey. 6sense allows intelligent growth resulting in new pipeline, higher marketing to sales conversions, larger opportunity size and increased sales productivity and effectiveness with teams focusing on the right “in-market” buyers with a need now.
AgilOne creates authentic omnichannel customer relationships that maximize lifetime value. AgilOne's restores relationships with companies with once customers before channel-specific marketing silos got in the way. Through a single view of customers across all channels, the company's predictive models help to understand customer behavior and real-time APIs to orchestrate personalized experiences across all touch-points. The AgilOne Customer Data and Engagement Hub supports more than 150 brands worldwide, including TK Maxx, Lululemon, JoAnn Stores, and Tumi.
GoodData enables large retail brands to share valuable analytics with district managers and suppliers in order to improve the location-specific customer experience, increase operational efficiencies across every location and enhance visibility into sell-through rates with an increase in revenue generated from each store and maximize gross margin return on inventory investment for the retail brand.
Qlik helps in getting data out of silos. It helps in combining all the data and generates valuable insights, and to transform retail operation to be faster, smarter, and more customer-centric. Qlik’s is a data analytics platform, which helps in combining all the shopping data across channels to gain a complete view of customer buying habits and preferences.
Sisense gives retailers a powerful business intelligence solution that allows any user to easily analyze, and visualize heaps of data from limitless sources to instantly get the visibility and answers needed to make smarter, faster business decisions. It helps in reducing the cost and maximizing profit.
