Measuring AI's ROI In Retail: Thinking Big And Small

ROI for AI in Retail may involve more than the standard calculationBigstockphoto.com AI makes prediction cheaper, and that means it can be used in more and more novel and unexpected ways to drive action in the world. To borrow a concept from Prediction Machines, prediction has become so cheap that we can use cameras, video analytics, and Machine Learning to predict human behavior well enough to enable self-driving cars – a concept that was technically unheard of a few short years ago. Self-driving cars, on the surface, has a business case. When you look at analyses of the benefits of self-driving cars, you find lots of numbers thrown around at an aggregate level – in the US, $317B saved from avoiding lethal crashes (even though so far, self-driving cars have not managed to avoid causing fatalities), $226B saved from avoiding non-lethal crashes, and $99B in time savings.