The future is now for AI.

IDC estimates that AI will have an impact on 25% of merchants, marketers, planners, and store operations personnel in the U.S. in 2019. It will improve productivity by 30% and results by up to 20%. Meanwhile, Gartner expects 85% of brand-consumer interaction to be managed by AI by 2020.

This whitepaper reveals  how retail and consumer goods companies are embracing AI to empower teams, drive performance, and improve the shopper experience, with a specific focus on AI’s application to promotion optimization. The industry is relying increasingly on AI-powered technologies to replace or augment traditional approaches to promotion optimization, which use historical data and are often calendar-based. Running instead on current, often real-time information, AI-powered tools can cross-reference millions of data points and consumer scenarios in a short period and on an evolving basis.

Promotions derived through AI can involve anything from store-level price incentives to mobile coupons to social media campaigns. In addition to picking the ideal promotion for the product, the right time frame, and the target consumer base, AI can determine which variables work best.

The whitepaper also covers how the basic principles of behavioral economics underpin an effective approach to shopper insight generation. Uncovering granular insights and capitalizing on them depends on a process of continuous learning and institutionalization of data-driven knowledge - enabled by the AI-powered solutions explored in this paper.

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