POS Systems Can Now Become Artificial Intelligence Weapons

In recent years we have seen significant scientific contributions to the field of human influence, which studies how the people we know and interact with influence the decisions we make. Coupled with the data already available about retail purchases and the latest advances in artificial intelligence, these new insights on human influence can strategically impact various segments of the retail industry. For a long time, retailers have been accumulating customer transaction information through Points of Sales terminals. Usually those metrics were only able to describe how effective retailers were in their attempts to influence individual customer behaviors. Whatever happened when clients interacted afterwards with their friends, families and coworkers--the concrete acts of social influence that many times lead to purchasing decisions--remained a mystery, a black hole of information.