AI could become your personal shopper

Artificial Intelligence has been seeping its way into the lives of every human and almost every industry. Be it while shopping online or even watching your favorite show on an OTT platform, AI is able to enhance customer experience at each step of the customer's journey and thus impact one's everyday life. Retailers are beginning to understand the importance of AI in automation and augmentation and are quickly adapting to it.

We know that the apparel industry is one of the biggest ever-growing industries. Today’s retailers have huge amounts of data to process. AI solves this problem by making sense of all this data and offers a faster way of doing tasks. It is able to do this with the help of iterative processing and intelligent algorithms, thus allowing the software to learn automatically. Let's look into some cases where AI is being used to transform the world of apparel retail.

Apps that need One Picture

There are apps nowadays that use machine vision to detect items on the web or a library and then suggest related items for you. It is actually like Shazam (used for music) for clothing and accessories. So basically these apps allow customers to use their smartphone cameras to take pictures of an item they like anywhere, be it in-store or in your homes. Once it has an image for reference, the app can display similar items from the store’s inventory. So this is super quick compared to the hours you spend searching for that similar dress you have.

Virtual Mirrors

A Virtual Mirror looks like a regular mirror, but the twist here is that you will be able to see how outfits look on you, without actually wearing them. It is a huge kiosk set up with a camera, and all it needs is a one time scan of your image. After this, you’re all set! You can try on a number of clothes on yourself, just by swiping. Not just clothes, you can try on handbags, shoes, and spectacles as well! Virtual mirrors will prove to be effective in the coming years for apparel retail because of the experience it provides.

Using AR for Selection

How about that time you walked into an apparel store and you searched for the price tag or size of the t-shirt? By using AR technology there’s no need to do so. The AR app on your smartphones will show various specifications of the product you are looking to buy, simply by scanning it. This tool can revolutionize apparel retail on how consumers interact with brands.

You need not be physically present in an apparel retail store to experience AR. You can use it at home as well. There are apps where you can customize an avatar based on your body type, and then see how different pieces of clothing or footwear will look from different angles. After this, it will suggest the nearest store or you can just buy it then itself!

Why AI should become your Personal Shopper?

There are many reasons why you should have AI as your personal shopper, here are some of them:

• Recommendations - All of us have gotten so used to getting recommendations for products, that we forget that it is AI that’s doing all the work. The main aspect of this process is the information they collect and integrate. The techniques used here are content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and knowledge-based systems. Everything works based on our interactions with various devices.
• Quicker Purchases - The amount of time it would take for you to browse through thousands of outfits would be very long. Artificial intelligence can solve that because it learns from your behavior and it chooses the apparel accordingly.
• New Trends - Because we are talking about apparel retail, there’s always talk about new trends entering the market. AI can be used to crawl social media sites, to identify trends. This helps brands to market their products with popular styles.
• The Right Prices - There are tools that help retailers maintain a competitive pricing strategy, by combining AI and machine learning. So, there is a rule-based engine that can optimize prices based on real-time external factors. In this manner, brands can set prices at a discounted rate compared to their competitors and benefit from it.

Artificial Intelligence is a crucial component of any retail store as it helps gather and analyze data much more efficiently. It helps the brands create a unique & personalized experience for each customer. AI tailors customer experience by understanding an individual's preference & behavior. With all these features that AI has to offer, we can surely say that AI can and will become every individual's favorite personal shopper!