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How Can A.I. Impact Consumer Goods Industry?

Consumer products industry is changing fast – maybe faster than other industries. The main force in the consumer products industry today is the consumer.

The plenty of information on the internet and social media puts the consumer in the position of power like never before. Luq Niazi, global managing director of IBM consumer industries, said in one of his interviews that the changing landscape across today’s retail and consumer industries has resulted in a rapid rise of emerging technologies, especially when it comes to automation and artificial intelligence. According to him, retail is one of the sectors to already implement and invest in cognitive and A.I. technologies, resulting in new and unexpected offerings for consumers and shoppers around the world. Consumer products companies can no longer depend on captive consumers who are reliably channelled to a few retail outlets in the physical world, where the bulk of control exists on the supply side of the equation. In a world of digital economy, consumers have the chance to buy anywhere instantly.

IBM’s institute for Business Value latest report, developed with the National Retail Federation, which surveyed 1,900 Retail and Consumer Products leaders across 23 countries, reveals that:

• 85% of retail and 79% of consumer products companies surveyed plan to be using intelligent automation for supply chain planning by 2021.

• 79% of retail and consumer products companies surveyed expect to be using intelligent automation for customer intelligence by 2021.

• Retail and consumer products executives surveyed project that intelligent automation capabilities could help increase annual revenue growth by up to 10 percent.

Most of the retail executives in the industry are exploring ways to apply intelligent automation to cross-functional collaboration and interactions with customers. These activities require involvement of more complex processes with additional system integrations. The two areas that show the highest growth in intelligent automation adoption over the next three years are: supply chain planning and in-store operations. Supply chain planning involves collaboration across multiple functions, such as materials, distribution, and transportation planning. The main purpose is to reduce the processes tying together manual planning functions.

The combination of accurate insights and the ability to act predictively and quickly makes A.I. an invaluable tool for sales and marketing teams in the consumer products industry. With the help of A.I. companies can deliver tailor-made products and follow-on services that consumers are looking for. AI provides the growing digital shoppers simplified personalised experiences that increase customer loyalty and retention. Through the implementation of AI technologies, companies in the consumer products industry can potentially benefit from higher sales, reducing manufacturing costs and improving the retail brand.

Our company works hard to develop a solution to the increasing needs of the consumer products industry. With HyperAspect A.I.Cloud pattern analytics capabilities retailers can optimise their supply chain planning by extracting trends from their distribution and product life cycles data, They can also increase demand forecasting by leveraging pattern analytics and natural language processing across their customer data, the Internet and social media. Optimisation algorithms developed with the HyperAspect A.I.Cloud tools can be applied on top of the already extracted customer intelligence data providing smart and personalised pricing for each product. Smart product personalisation increasing product appeal can be developed by using intelligent processing of customer data from all types of sources (text/image/voice).