7 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Changing Consumer Products

Artificial intelligence is changing the product industry. In the world of consumer products, artificial intelligence is making it possible to develop products according to the data, instead of gut feeling.

Here are seven examples of how AI is being used in the world of consumer products.

1. Delivering the next big thing

Research by Gartner found that 45% of product launches are delayed by at least one month, while a damning Harvard Business Review study indicates that a whopping 95% of new consumer products fail.

The reason is simple: A lot of new product strategies are based around gut-feeling, not data. Executives think, what’s the next big thing? What products should we launch? The answer lies in the data, not in our instincts, as the statistics show.

Highly successful product strategies, by the likes of Coca Cola, Unilever, Suzuki, and other industry leaders, leverage Commerce.AI’s data engine, which covers everything from market research and competitive analysis to product design and launch strategy.

Timing new products is notoriously difficult, and businesses that mess up timing, frankly, end up wasting money. With machine learning, you don’t have to wait for consumer demand to rise, or hope that it does. You can forecast trends to know exactly when to launch.

2. Thriving against the competition

There are more products than ever before. In 2004, for instance, Walmart reported that its average Supercenter housed over 142,000 products, and HBR reports that 30,000 new consumer products are released every year.

Using Commerce.AI, top brands can track their competition closely, identify similar products and services, and get notified when they launch. Thus, AI is a powerful tool to help thrive against the competition.

Competitive strategy is complex, with a seemingly endless landscape of data to pay attention to. This means that the traditional ways of gathering and using customer information are slow, limited in scope, difficult to scale up, and ultimately too much effort. 

Commerce.AI changes this process dramatically, synthesizing over a trillion data points to give you a holistic understanding of your marketing, surface emerging competitors, and more.

3. Getting at the heart of the customer  

Making your customers feel like they’re heard and understood is at the heart of good customer service, and indeed at the heart of a good product strategy.

To truly understand the right segments and personas for your products and services, you need a data-driven approach to market intelligence.

Commerce.AI aggregates interview, survey, product reviews and profile data at scale so market researchers can better support key business decisions across the organization.

Whether you’re tasked with defining new features for a next-gen product, understanding the motivation behind purchases, or predicting the future, Commerce.AI can help you along the way.

A great Harvard Business Review case study explores the benefits of empathetic product design, which involves using data to get at the heart of your customer, and design products based on those insights. This used to be a time-intensive, difficult effort that required in-person connections to your target market. Commerce.AI is automating the power of empathetic product design.

4. Turning customer touch points into business wins

As a Google report finds, “the brands that can provide relevant content at key touchpoints are the ones that will win consumer trust and come out on top.”

That said, the content landscape is bigger than ever, and providing the right content and the right touchpoints is easier said than done. With Commerce.AI, Customer Experience teams across the organization can access product use cases, product issues, top features, product comparisons, and topline expert reviews to help them drive sales and customer loyalty.

Doing so is critical to delivering brand experiences and increasing product awareness, conversions and profitability.  

Moreover, successful customer touch points are more than just an immediate win. They’re an opportunity to find partnerships, build communities, create content, and drive customer loyalty.

5. Letting your product content do the talking

Bill Gates once famously said that “content is king.”

Nowadays, so-called “sales copy” isn’t what leads to sales. Instead, customers make purchase decisions based on who they know, like, and trust, which is often the people and companies that produce the most valuable content.

We spend more time than ever consuming content, to the extent that brands need to prioritize product content to gain the attention of potential customers.

Commerce.AI offers retailers and brands tools to automatically monitor, enhance, and recommend product content, aligning product information with shopper intent, language, and behavior.

A significant portion of time, money and resources goes into product information management – from organizing products sold to determining how to make product catalogs relevant and searchable to provide better recommendations. Commerce.AI supports retailers in product catalog management by optimizing product content at scale.

From product catalogs to product descriptions, catalog optimization brings a new level of insight and action to facilitate your digital transformation.

6. Turbocharging your digital innovation

As PwC reports, the majority of employers are worried that their digital innovation initiatives are hampered by a lack of skills, which makes sense: Digital innovation is a broad topic, with a number of complex skills needed to achieve success.

Commerce.AI does the heavy lifting in digital innovation by aggregating, unifying, and synthesizing data at scale so that anyone in the organization can make instant data-driven decisions.

This is of particular importance for post-COVID digital transformation. Now, digital transformation is accelerating at record pace. More data is getting created that gives us real-time understanding of demand and supply. 

7. Empowering your data science teams

The majority of companies are attempting to adopt big data analytics and other data science techniques. At the same time, the vast majority of these projects never make it to production. 

Companies realize the potential power of data science, but lack the resources to successfully execute on data science initiatives.

Commerce.AI simplifies the jobs of data science teams, with a single source of truth. Data science teams can correlate Commerce.AI data with their internal data and take business decisions to the next level. 

With this level of improved scale, the power of data science can be fully leveraged to strengthen product strategy.

Summary

Product strategy is more complex than ever, with millions of consumer products in existence, tens of thousands more coming out every year, and a dramatically shifting post-COVID landscape.

To understand and take action on a vast nexus of interconnected data points, product teams need to be armed with AI, which can power everything from product and competitive strategy to customer experience and digital transformation.