week12.html

<title> CS349 Spring 2019: Robert McInvale</title>
<h1 style = "font-size:300%;"><b> Robert McInvale CS 349 Blog</h1></b>
<h2 style = "font-size:200%;">Week 12 - The Role of AI</h1></b>

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The business of the retail industry is to sell as many products as possible, at the highest price possible, to the largest number of people possible. This has probably been the case since the first prehistoric man put down his club, pasted on a friendly smile, and established the discipline known as “marketing.” Only recently, however, has the art begun to be perfected. This has been possible due primarily to advancements in artificial intelligence, which have permitted deep, automatic analysis of customer behavior on a level that is unprecedented. This shift away from human analysis of customer behavior and towards automated analysis has radically changed the paradigm of how marketing is done in retail stores; for instance, while humans used to observe the behavior of customers and attempt to tailor advertisements and offers based on their preferences in a process known as “clienteling,” those activities are now being performed automatically by AI through machine analysis of camera footage.<sup>1</sup> This not only provides improved results applicable to a number of customers that could never have been reached previously, but also replaces some of the duties of - and some of the available jobs for retail employees. At the same time, however, these innovations bring with them an increased demand for technical expertise, and job opportunities for those who understand how to run and maintain such AI systems.<sup>2</sup>
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The outcome of all of these changes is difficult to foresee, but the transition towards an increasingly AI-driven marketing experience seems inevitable. Whether customers will embrace the idea of, for example, walmart using facial scanning technology to tell which customers are happy and which are frustrated while standing in line,<sup>3</sup> or whether they will end up rebelling against such a creepy system of machine surveillance, only time can tell. In the meantime, though, the retail industry’s marketing strategy is slowly being transformed - and one can only imagine it will continue.
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<sup>1</sup><a href="https://www.digitalistmag.com/customer-experience/2017/09/19/ai-machine-learning-spell-end-of-retail-as-we-know-it-05350268">https://www.digitalistmag.com/customer-experience/2017/09/19/ai-machine-learning-spell-end-of-retail-as-we-know-it-05350268</a></br>
<sup>2</sup><a href="https://www.business.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-changing-retail/">https://www.business.com/articles/artificial-intelligence-changing-retail/</a><br>
<sup>3</sup><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/08/29/how-walmart-is-using-machine-learning-ai-iot-and-big-data-to-boost-retail-performance/#25cf54bc6cb1">https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/08/29/how-walmart-is-using-machine-learning-ai-iot-and-big-data-to-boost-retail-performance/#25cf54bc6cb1</a><br>