The consumer shift to e-commerce shopping is rapidly transforming the retail industry. The average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 advertisements per day, but today's digitally connected customers are savvy. According to McKinsey, 71 percent of customers expect an increasingly more personalized online shopping experience. They also expect an endless selection of products and are conditioned to look elsewhere if they have a poor shopping experience.
Meanwhile, a retailer’s inventory is complex, with thousands, if not millions of products that change seasonally. Not to mention the immensely competitive marketplace that’s emerged over the past decade, with tens of retailers selling the same or similar products. Experience differentiation is increasingly becoming a key to attracting and retaining customers. The winners have harnessed the power of AI and data science to offer real-time, hyper-personalized customer experiences that increase cart size, build brand affinity, and increase conversion.
Making real-time product recommendations is extremely challenging. Customer preferences and needs change constantly. What they want today may change tomorrow or even within a single shopping session.
To use insights gained from the mass volumes of data collected while customers are shopping, a retailer needs a system that can quickly create a 360-degree view of customers to accurately predict preferences and make real-time recommendations. The broader product offerings are, the wider operations and a customer base grow and the harder this puzzle becomes to solve—which is why it requires AI.
Retailers are using AI recommender systems to drive every action shoppers can take, from visiting a webpage to interacting with a shopping advisor (chatbot) to using social media for shopping. They also improve conversion by offering relevant products from the exponential number of available options.
With 25.7 million active customers and 150,000 products on site at a time, ASOS implemented NVIDIA Triton™ Inference Server to develop recommendations and personalized search systems that offer roughly 500,000 recommendations per second and 5 billion recommendations daily.