Like many one-note fashion brands before it, luxury lingerie brand Cosabella wants to become a lifestyle brand. Cosabella is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to track customer behavior, high- and low-performing products, and popular silhouettes and color patterns to predict what new categories and pieces will sell. "The smarter we get with AI, the longer our customer stays with us. The longer a customer stays with us, the better we get at improving product, fit, fabric and silhouette," said Cosabella CEO Guido Campello. Cosabella, which sells its items globally through its own channels as well as through wholesale partners like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's, operates a 100-person team.

Lingerie brand Cosabella began its initial use of artificial intelligence to enhance its marketing efforts ahead of 2017's Valentine's Day, and saw a sales lift in email-driven" 2016 revenues by more than 60 percent compared to the prior year. Now, as it looks to this year's Valentine's Day and beyond, the Miami-based lingerie brand has more fully integrated AI technology into its CRM system to better connect online and offline shoppers. Cosabella sells its Italian-made wares at its own NYC flagship boutique and through 1,000-plus U.S. physical locations via retail partners like Nordstrom, Macy's, Bloomingdales, Sak's Fifth Ave., among others. About six months ago, Cosabella began working with Snap Style Business, a software company that markets personalization software to retailers. The lingerie brand served as a launch partner for Snap Style's StyleWidget, which enables customers to submit a personalized styling request directly on Cosabella's desktop or mobile site.

Cosabella, eBay and 1-800-Flowers.com may not appear to have many things in common at first glance. While Cosabella and 1-800-Flowers.com are family owned, the first was launched in 1983, as an importer/exporter of Italian-made garments. And then there's eBay, founded in 1995, and boasting its own successful e-commerce history that evolved from online auction sales to offering services such PayPal and online ticket sales. But a closer look at the three retailers reveals a strong passion for driving personalization and customization and staying at the forefront of conversational commerce to ensure customers get what they want, what they expect and, quite frankly, what they're demanding when it comes to ways to interact and buy. The retailers also have another common trait: an ongoing love of technology.

Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly present in sales and marketing software. And many believe that it is not just going to have an impact but that it is going to dramatically reshape how sales and marketing function in the coming years. While the phone call is an ancient phenomenon to many individuals, companies large and small still conduct a lot of their sales activity over the phone. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, tracking, analyzing and improving the performance of salespeople on phone calls is a much more challenging task than, say, tracking, analyzing and improving the performance of email sales. But a number of companies, including Marketo, AdRoll and Qualtrics, are using "conversation intelligence" company Chorus.ai's

When lingerie brand Cosabella announced that it'd moved away from its digital marketing agencies in favor of artificial intelligence, companies across the board took note. The two aspects of its decision that got the most attention were revenue (how much money did AI produce?) and personnel (how many people did AI replace?). These two questions go hand in hand because, perhaps contrary to belief, not all companies are jumping at the opportunity to replace staff with autonomous technology. They're eager to hear about AI's potential to scale their productivity and revenue and work at a pace that can't be achieved by human teams alone. But they're often cautious when it comes to how AI will ultimately transform jobs we no longer need to new ones that we do.

When it comes to misconceptions about artificial intelligence, the likely top one is that retailers tend to view AI too narrowly and don't realize how the technology can help solve every retail problem. Simply, AI isn't just about weaving chat bots into the retail customer experience or just streamlining operations. It's about teaching retailers about their customers via deep learning and genetic algorithms, providing insight on how users interact with products, how messages resonate with shoppers and how to better market products. "Every step of the customer journey will be transformed by retail, from the ads and content that bring in customers to their experience on the site to logistics and shipping and even product design. AI won't be replacing marketers or site architects, but it will be making them far more powerful," explained Andy Narayanan, vice president of intelligence commerce at Sentient, in an email interview with Retail Customer Experience.

The consumer in-store retail experience is undergoing a critical evolution, and it's clearly upended the retail industry: in the first four months of 2017 alone, there have been fourteen retail bankruptcies -- almost as many as in all of 2016. Other companies, such as J.C. Penney, Macy's, and Sears, have announced massive store closures. While putting together Firebrand Group's Future of Artificial Intelligence report for our clients (you can get an excerpt, focused on retail innovation, here), my team and I reviewed nearly one hundred brands engaging in some form of retail innovation. Starbucks already allows people to order remotely and go into their retail locations to pick up drinks, and is presently deploying an AI assistant into their app. Called My Starbucks Barista, the feature will allow users to place orders with one tap of a button, then speaking to a virtual barista.

Courtney Connell: Humans want to be in control. They want to think they've already come up with the best solution. Give a machine different options and watch it deduce the actual reality with confidence--that's hard for a lot of people to understand. By the end of this year, my team will be capable of understanding it and handling anything thrown at us. Guido Campello: AI has to get to the point where the entry-level employee in an organization, especially a family company as small as ours, is able to understand it, use it, manipulate it, analyze it and contribute it to what it's needed for.

Part of the fun of judging the CR Annual (which will be published in our May issue) is in spotting this year's trends. In the graphic design categories this time around, we saw a huge amount of Memphis-inspired work, alongside lots of geometric sans type and the continuing influence of the work of Design Studio, particularly its colour palettes. In the face of the great automation debate (which we explore in depth here), creative people have taken refuge in a belief that machines could not possibly replicate what they do. But when you see so much work looking so similar, you do start to wonder. The ability of digital systems to observe how people are using them and, therefore, what they want from them, has so far been portrayed in positive terms.

Beyond the political underpinning, the fake news agenda and the plethora of VR experiences, the one technology to really know about while at SXSW in Austin this year, was artificial intelligence (AI). That sentence has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because it's almost impossible to think of AI as a single idea, or indeed even a "trend" these days, for the very fact it is so fundamentally beginning to underpin everything we do. Christian Ward, senior editor of media and marketing at trends service Stylus, referenced Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said: "We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in computing that is like nothing we've seen in decades." We've been living in a world that has slowly become mobile-first, he explained, but we're moving to one that is ultimately AI-first. The view at SXSW was broken down into really what this means, both at a top line societal level and at the more applicable brand one.