Miller Zell Speaker Series: Embracing AI in Retail with Dave Sutton

Editor's Notes

1. Using these five core concepts, retailers can move away form that Minority Report future and instead begin to use digital marketing to nurture real connections with customers. Digital marketing tools are ideal for placing the customer at the center of your brand. Will we go back to some imagined time in the past when things were better and everyone was happy? No. We will enter into a new and better hybrid future in which technology is used for the common good and reintroduces the human touch back into retail sales.
2. [Recount personal Dave Sutton anecdote about the retail of childhood] Personable, Trusted, Local, Knowledgeable, and Social
3. Retail marketing has new challenges It lacks the human touch It’s interruptive and doesn’t put the customer first It makes ineffective use of digital tools like A.I. and facial recognition And customers use ad blockers more and more frequently. As a result, fears about privacy, ubiquity, and invasiveness prevail just as they did in 2002. And things are even getting worse.
4. Whisper - Automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680K hours of multilingual and multitasking supervised data collected from the web.It supports transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English. VALL-E - Text-to-speech synthesis by training a neural codec language model (VALL-E). VALL-E emerges in-context learning capabilities and can be used to synthesize high-quality personalized speech with only a 3-second enrolled recording of an unseen speaker as an acoustic prompt. VALL-EX, can convert a person's voice into another language based on a single utterance Character.ai - Neural language model chatbot web application that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversations. Synthesia – Creates life-like video avatars that can be scripted or driven by GPT
5. Whisper - Automatic speech recognition (ASR) system - speech to text - supports transcription in multiple languages VALL-E – Microsoft - Text-to-speech synthesis Character.ai - Chatbot web application that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversations. Synthesia – Creates life-like video avatars that can be scripted or driven by GPT Zilliant – AI-enabled pricing optimization and management – market-aligned dynamic pricing to create win-win Albert – AI enabled media buying – connecting messages to the right people at the right time at the right spend Bluecore – AI-enabled targeting connecting relevant messages and offers to people to activate purchase intent at MOTs RetailNext – IoT and AI–enabled modern retailer – foot traffic, video security, shopper journey, merchandising, store layouts, etc. ShoppingGives – Ai-enabled POS applications to present relevant charitable giving options to shoppers – connecting commerce with cause
6. How to Get It Wrong Be impersonal: According to an Accenture study, 44% of consumers believe retailers fail to deliver relatable, personalized experiences. Be intrusive: 92% of consumers are worried about their online data privacy but nearly 7 in 10 want a personalized shopping experience Be overeager: No one wants to get an offer for greater savings just after they’ve recently made a purchase. Give it time. Counterexample: Amazon equipping their Ring video doorbells with facial recognition. The bells were meant for convenience and ease of delivery, but were also promoted as a way to track “suspicious people.” Amazon was immediately and widely criticized in the press for this.
7. How to Get It Wrong Be impersonal: According to an Accenture study, 44% of consumers believe retailers fail to deliver relatable, personalized experiences. Be intrusive: 92% of consumers are worried about their online data privacy but nearly 7 in 10 want a personalized shopping experience Be overeager: No one wants to get an offer for greater savings just after they’ve recently made a purchase. Give it time. Counterexample: Amazon equipping their Ring video doorbells with facial recognition. The bells were meant for convenience and ease of delivery, but were also promoted as a way to track “suspicious people.” Amazon was immediately and widely criticized in the press for this.
8. By making the customer the hero you create a commercial environment that isn’t just powered by machine learning and digital tools—you make one that uses those tools for a better world. Through the use of Customized Choice, Emotional Relevance, Shared Value, Constant Connectivity, and Genuine Purpose, you empower relationships among people and between retailers and their customers.s With the help of digital tools, you bring a new day to market. You bring Main Street back to life.