Amid the artificial intelligence hype cycle, footwear and accessories retailer ALDO is working to establish its internal AI foundations, expecting tools to evolve from promising hypotheses to mechanisms that deliver business results.
Last October, the retailer held its first Retail General AI hackathon in collaboration with McGill University and Amazon Web Services in Montreal. He planned to improve ALDO's search functions and increase product recommendations. Fateh Naimi, VP of data and AI at ALDO, said the company is still focused on growing these areas.
“Having machine learning and generative AI is something that people are really working on,” he said. “But they all need a good foundation, from a statistical point of view, to be able to strengthen all of them. [the functionalities]”
Currently, ALDO is using everything from machine learning to generative AI, including predictive AI, which uses machine learning to make predictions about future events. Like other companies, generative AI is in its early stages, used to generate text, SEO and product descriptions, while predictive AI — a work in progress, he says — predicts demand and sales. Used for things including gui and discount optimization.
Building and training machine learning and generative AI capabilities requires data, Nabi said, but ALDO's data efforts go back at least the last five years, to consumer data such as website clicks and in-store purchases. A collection of patterns, Nayebi said. To ensure the safety of that data, the retailer has its own data cleanroom that collects insights as opposed to personally identifiable information that “could apply to anyone,” he added.
“We built all these foundations to do these data and AI products,” he said. “We're already running our retail e-com supply chain based on this data. Now we're leveraging the same data for recommendations for demand forecasting and other insights.
To put it plainly, data from ALDO's store interactions and e-commerce business is brought in, anonymized and fed into AI and machine learning models including product recommendations, demand forecasting and sales, he said. is brought to use in forecasting. The company declined to share specific figures to show the impact of AI on business but expects to see savings in marketing costs as things progress, according to Naabi.
As data privacy initiatives continue, no matter how slow the death of Google's third-party cookie, ALDO plans to “future-proof” its datasets, the so-called AI beast. is relying on its own first-party data to feed
“We know that tracking and all that kind of stuff is not going to be something we should rely on in the future,” he said. “So what we try to achieve is actually bringing insights based on the aggregate level of consumer patterns.”
In the creative AI boom, some companies are looking to AI for quick headline grabs while others are looking to it to solve utilities – something AI has the potential to solve. However, it remains to be seen if AI is the workhorse that will deliver.
Brian Yamada, VML's chief innovation officer, said every company is feeling some pressure to figure out how to incorporate generative AI and machine learning into their processes. The question is how much a company commits to building internal systems for the future of AI versus working with external partners, such as OpenAI or Microsoft AI, he added.
“It's going to be a mix of construction buying. The speed at which the market is moving is creating a problem. It's a big challenge because it's hard to keep up,” he said. I'm spending my time drinking from the AI firehose and trying to drown.”
Freddie Dabaghi, managing director of activations at Crispin advertising agency, made a similar comment.
“Brands are leveraging their tools and systems to take more control over data privacy. These internal teams are also building AI task forces, but they are not moving at the pace of marketers,” Dabghi said in an email. .
The key, Yamada added, is being flexible as AI shakes itself out, revealing its most effective use cases as the hype cycle continues. He added that building internal systems to capture data, train models and create internal processes, as ALDO is doing, could be a step in the right direction even as land renovations and Changes
“The key is just to be flexible, not too closed and not too rigid in any way,” he said of the future of generative AI. “We're moving into a much more fluid environment.”