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LONDON — While the fundamentals of retailing — value, price, convenience and service — remain as important as ever, technology, most especially artificial intelligence (AI), is having a transformative impact, particularly in the area of personalization. Those are some of the key conclusions reached by a panel of executives during the inaugural Future of Commerce 2030 session held here recently.
Moderated by Wendy Liebmann, chief executive officer and chief shopper of WSL Strategic Retail, the panelists included Alex Gourlay, executive chair of Holland Barrett; Matthew Barnes, chief executive officer of Tesco U.K.; and Marco Kormann Rodrigues, partner leader of retail and CPG for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Barnes noted that Tesco had employed AI for some time, particularly as a means of improving productivity in such applications as optimizing truck routes. However, the United Kingdom’s largest retailer is moving into a new phase in its use of AI.
“For us going forward it’s about personalizing much more to consumers, getting to know our consumers better, and AI helping us to generate far more impact in terms of what we’re offering customers,” Barnes said. “I think AI is enabling us to make sense of all the enormous data we have for 23 million Tesco Club Card holders and to inform us in the best possible way to deliver a personalized experience to the customer.”
Gourlay pointed out that Holland & Barrett is working in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on an app called Sabra that will take all the health and wellness information the customer is willing to share and then present a highly personalized solution. “What we’re seeing already is that a human empowered by technology will really increase our ability to take care of our customers and build more trust with them both for today and tomorrow.”
Rodrigues pointed out that Amazon has been deploying AI across its operations for more than 25 years, going back to the days when the company was an online bookseller. However, he emphasized, the emergence of generative AI is very different and promises to be as transformative a technology as the internet itself. By collecting customer data across all touchpoints and placing it in a data platform, retailers will be able to continually learn, test, iterate and optimize at a far faster rate than ever before.
