A.I. is Making Retail Smarter Too

"It's a funny thing," said Jay McCarthy, VP of product marketing for Qubit. "We're ironically using tech to be more human again. The London-based product suite, which executes on big data for B2C brands like Uniqlo, Thomas Cook, and Time Inc, is using machine learning algorithms to translate customer signals into the right product offerings. Qubit clients have "maybe millions of customer records, in some cases," says McCarthy. "The signal-to-noise ratio is quite low." Qubit's aim is to "find the needles in the haystack, and scale interactions with customers." What that means in practice is aggregating data from online and POS transactions -- "There's an overlap of brick and mortar," McCarthy say -- loyalty programs, CRM, product returns, and logistics -- to develop "a more holistic view of the customer; where they live on and offline." But this is no idle inquiry, of course. "So much of what you hear [from vendors]," McCarthy explains, "stops at the notion of'We'll give you something insightful from that.'