Retail AI: Death By A Thousand Cuts

When people say "AI software", what do they really mean? This is a critically important question to understanding the impact that AI can have on the retail industry (on any industry, really), and a significant source of the gap that exists between AI hype and reality. While McKinsey focuses on AI types of classification, prediction, and generation, I've found it more useful to look at natural language processing, computer vision, and prediction. But each of these are umbrella terms for lots of what amount to "micro-capabilities", which is an important limitation when thinking about AI. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, but sometimes referred to as Human-Level Artificial Intelligence) is at least 20 years off, according to experts in the field, and possibly 50 years.