Retailers looking to AI for search and product recommendations - Which-50

While personalisation remains the most popular place for innovation among US retailers, there is clear evidence that AI has started to gain traction. According to a new report from SailThru called the Digital Retail Innovation Report, "Although marketers have been able to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for some time, adoption is still limited." "Of the two thirds of marketers (66 per cent) who leverage AI for marketing purposes, the most common applications are in search (37 per cent) and product recommendations (33 per cent), which are employed by at least one third of marketers," the report said. Among the other common responses were application through programmatic advertising (26 per cent) and data science (26 per cent). The authors said, "AI use alone wasn't enough to guarantee marketing success: Marketers leveraging AI in one or more of the listed channels/methods weren't significantly more likely to have met or exceeded their 2016 marketing goals, suggesting that not all applications and methods are equally useful, and that simply employing AI-based solutions is not sufficient for marketing success."