The retail sector has always witnessed cutting-edge technology transformations, enhancing its efficiency and improving customer experiences. This trend continues as generative AI is gaining the interest of leading retail businesses, such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart who have leveraged the technology to enhance their productivity.
However, this is only the beginning. There is a lot generative AI can do in the retail sector. This is why as per some reports, the Gen-AI will have a huge financial impact of $9.2 trillion by 2029, demonstrating the huge disruption and possibilities for global retailers.
When we talk about the use of generative AI in retail, a few ideas that come into the majority of people’s minds are usually creating product descriptions and images or engaging taglines for marketing purposes.
But, do you know the potential of generative AI in retail is beyond this? In this blog, we have explained the top use cases of generative AI in the retail industry. A bonus for our readers; we have also provided the best generative AI solutions used in retail businesses.
So, are you ready to explore the use cases of generative AI? Let’s get started!
Generative AI and Its Use in the Retail Industry: Latest Statistics
Explore the latest statistics of generative AI and its relation with the retail industry.
Source: Statista
- The market size in the generative AI market is projected to reach $36.06 billion in 2024 growing at a CAGR of 46.47%, from 2024-2030.
- According to the McKinsey survey, generative AI tools are mostly used for sales and marketing, product and service development, and service operations, such as back-office support and customer care.
- Approximately 97% of business owners say that ChatGPT will benefit their businesses.
- According to the CSA, more than 93% of respondents participating in a survey, stated that they are already leveraging generative AI for some sort of personalization, such as writing custom emails or providing product recommendations.
- A new survey by Nvidia shows that approximately 98% of retailers plan to invest in generative AI technology in the coming 18 months.
This clearly shows that retail chains are eagerly wanting to invest in generative AI, and some of them have even started to leverage it in their daily operations. In the next section, we will discuss how retailers are using generative AI and fetching out profitable results.
Use Cases of Generative AI In the Retail Industry
Leading retailers, such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart use generative AI in the following ways:
- Product Designs
Let’s start the conversation with the basic ones that most people know. Generative AI is used by retailers to design their products, such as clothing articles, furniture, home decor, and many others.
On giving the prompts, the Generative AI leverages its machine learning and deep learning capabilities to generate real-like designs based on its training data. It helps the design team a lot in brainstorming ideas for new product designs or recreating existing ones.
Source: McKinsey Digital
- Marketing Personalization
What is the first thing you do when receive a notification like this from a food delivery app?
Probably, you first smile, then order food from the app. The same applies to other people too. The key is personalization marketing to enhance customer interaction and convert them into sales.
According to studies conducted in the USA, 63% of participants said that personalization improves consumer interactions and, as a result, conversion rates.
Therefore, the retail sector is also using the potential of generative AI in creating custom marketing campaigns, memes, emails, notifications, and more, to gain customers’ attention, convince them, and convert them into sales.
Source: Message Gears
- Virtual Try-Ons
Generative AI is also used to provide virtual try-ons, helping customers with making purchasing decisions.
Combined with augmented reality, genAI creates a virtual 3D overlay of a product on the real image of a person.
This is used for trying clothing articles, sunglasses, sneakers, or even home furniture or decor items. This way, retailers engage customers and increase their sales.
- Virtual Shopping Assistants
Generative AI is used in the retail sector to empower virtual shopping assistants in retail apps, offline stores, websites, etc.
According to a survey conducted In 2023, 55% of commerce leaders used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to build conversational digital shopping assistants.
Source: Amazon Rufus
Virtual shopping assistants enabled with generative AI help users find what they are looking for.
Thanks to generative AI technology, shopping assistants understand the shopper’s requirements and recommend products, describe them, quote the prices, and more, providing an enhanced shopping experience.
In short, virtual assistants do whatever a real shopping assistant does in an offline store.
- Customer Support Automation
Similar to virtual shopping assistants, generative AI also enhances the capabilities of customer support by providing automation and minimizing human interference.
The customer support bot powered by generative AI can answer the frequently asked queries of customers in retail. The more data it is trained with, the more it can perform efficiently.
According to Capgemini, 67% of firms agree that generative AI can improve customer service by offering automated and personalized support.
- Inventory and Supply Chain Management
Another use case of generative AI in retail is helping with inventory management. Also, generative AI in the supply chain plays an important role in ensuring the smooth running of retail.
Generative AI can help the retail manpower to understand inventory reports and provide them with crucial insights. These insights help in managing inventory efficiently. Generative AI like ChatGPT and Gemini can help retail executives in creating emails, purchase and sell orders, and more, in less time.
Moreover, GenAI can also detect potential fraud patterns and give warnings, thus minimizing fraud cases.
- Automated Content Generation
Engaging content is crucial for improving sales in the retail business. Generative AI, thus, helps in creating engaging content in just a few moments.
Whether it’s a product description, offer deals, jingles, or engaging images or videos to attract customers, generative AI can do it all. However, human expertise will still be required to refine it, but it does most of the work completely.
Source: ChatGPT
- Market Research
Generative AI helps retailers research the market, and understand customer requirements and emerging trends.
This helps retail businesses come up with new products, and modifications to the existing ones, and optimize their inventory management strategies for maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Generative AI, for instance, can help furniture retailers analyze the demand for eco-friendly substitutes for leather covers for couches and cushions. After understanding this, the retailers can substitute pure leather with vegan leather, which offers the same feel as pure leather.
This way, the furniture retailers used generative AI to understand customer’s needs and come up with a product that fulfills their needs.
Hence, these are the top use cases of Generative AI in the retail sector. Now, let’s proceed and explore the best Generative AI solutions used by leading retailers.
Best Generative AI Solutions Revolutionizing the Retail Industry
The following are the best generative Artificial Intelligence solutions used by leading retail brands worldwide.
- ChatGPT and Gemini
These two generative AI solutions do not need an introduction. ChatGPT is a freemium genAI solution from OpenAI whereas Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a product of Google.
These both are text-based generative AI solutions used for writing product descriptions, marketing content, jingles, promotional offers, and more. A user can give text-based prompts and get results based on them in a few moments.
- Midjourney and DALL·E 2
Other leading generative AI solutions to use in retail businesses are Midjourney and DALL. E 2. These are text-to-image generative AI tools used for generating realistic images from text prompts.
The images created by these tools can be used for marketing purposes in retail, designing new products, or recreating existing ones.
- Synthesia and Deepbrain AI
Synthesia and Deepbrain AI are best suited for generating real-like videos using text prompts.
These generative AI tools can be used in the retail industry to create custom high-quality videos to be used as promotions, product tutorials, and more.
- Soundraw and Beatoven.AI
The Soundraw and Beatoven.AI are text-to-music generators that create unique and royalty-free music. These help retailers create music, promotional songs, and jingles to promote their business.
- Custom Generative AI Solutions
Custom Generative AI solutions are designed to fulfill the specific needs of retail businesses. It might include GenAI-powered virtual try-ons, customer support solutions, virtual shopping assistants, and more.
You can contact a leading generative AI development company to develop a custom generative Artificial Intelligence solution that fits your retail business.
Hence, these are the top generative AI solutions for the retail industry.
Benefits of Using Generative AI in Retail
Generative AI provides the following benefits in the retail sector:
- Saves Time
Generative AI quickly evaluates customer requirements and offers them products tailored to their requirements. This saves time for customers and staff and leads to enhanced shopping experience and improved efficiency.
- Reduce Costs
Generative AI helps retailers to manage inventories efficiently and cut excess inventory costs.
Also, GenAI helps with addressing customer queries and assists customers with shopping. This saves a considerable amount of overall costs for the retail businesses.
- Efficient Fraud Detection
Generative AI can swiftly identify irregularities in the retail chain, transaction data, and inventories by analyzing the reports and related data. Thus, it benefits retailers in detecting fraud.
- Dynamic Pricing
Generative AI also helps retail businesses to maximize their profits by recommending them dynamic pricing strategies for products and services, depending on the market trends, supply and demand, and other factors.
- Competitive Advantage
Last but not least, Generative AI can help retailers gain a competitive edge in the market. A retailer leveraging generative AI can design innovative products, manage inventories better, and reduce time-to-market. All these factors together make the retailer better than the competition.
Therefore, these are the benefits of leveraging generative AI in retail.
Summing Up
Time is changing at a rapid pace. Every retail business worldwide is digitalizing itself by leveraging cutting-edge technologies and one of them is generative AI.
Leading retailers, such as Walmart, Amazon, and eBay have already opted for the technology because of the benefits it provides.
Generative AI empowers product innovation, virtual shopping assistance, creating marketing campaigns, analyzing and managing inventories, and more, resulting in the growth of retail businesses.
So, if you are also into retail, leveraging Generative AI will be a plus point for your business. Thus, reach out to our team and opt for the best generative AI development services to build a custom generative AI solution tailored to your specific needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, you can develop a custom generative AI for your retail business. However, it requires years of experience and deep knowledge of generative AI, machine learning, programming languages, and other technical aspects. So, we recommend you hire a top generative AI development company to develop your solution.
The time for developing a generative AI solution depends on the type and specific requirements of the solution. It may take between three months to up to a year to develop a generative artificial intelligence solution.
The cost of developing a generative AI depends on the factors, such as its type, technology stack, development team size, and more. Therefore, we suggest you share your requirements with our team and we will quote the detailed cost breakdown to build a generative AI.