Imagine customers sending their entire shopping lists to your website or app â then seeing a screen where they can buy everything at once, with options theyâll most like highlighted for them. Imagine perpetually knowing the perfect inventory balance: skirting both surplus and stock-outs. And imagine easily delivering hyper-personalized marketing: enticing individual shoppers with the right items and offers at just the right time.
Youâre probably not doing all this now â but thanks to generative AI (GenAI), it may be the wave of the future. Do you want to ride that wave?
Itâs a question many grocery executives have been considering since GenAI exploded onto the scene last year. The technology is teeming with potential for grocery retailers: transforming everything from ecommerce search to inventory management to marketing communications and more. Some emerging applications will be winners; others may be duds.
As they weigh use cases, especially customer-facing ones, grocery execs often consider their customer base, asking questions like: Are they early adopters? Are they tech-forward? Will our customers want to adopt this, or will they have qualms? Is it worth the investment?
A recent survey from Deloitte sheds some light on shoppersâ mindsets: 53% say they donât want AI-generated communications from their primary grocer, and just over two in 10 (22%) think their grocer would use GenAI responsibly in customer interactions. In short, there are objections to be overcome. So, is it time to get out of the kitchen?
Not really. Just as you canât make a dish that pleases everyone, itâs unrealistic to expect all your customers, or even the majority, to immediately dig in. Instead, the better question to ask is: âIs this type of GenAI-based innovation some version of the future? Will it eventually be good enough that many, if not most, shoppers will adopt it?â If you think the answer is no, then stop there.
But if the answer is âyesâ or even âprobablyâ â because it makes shoppersâ lives easier, drives important internal efficiencies and/or delivers measurable value â then itâs likely worth starting to consider and experiment. You may draw just a small portion of your users at first, but thatâs OK. Itâs a part of the adoption curve, and itâs worth incenting and catering to these early adopters. Theyâll be instrumental in evangelizing the new feature(s) to help you âcross the chasmâ to more mainstream adoption.
History shows that the companies that are the first to make bets on the wave of the future are often those that survive and thrive. Look at Amazon and the e-commerce curve of adoption â not everyone, or even many people at all, wanted to shop online at the time. But Amazon had a good idea of what the future would look like and won big because of it. It wasnât that everyone wanted to buy all their products online in 1994. It was that Amazon figured weâd eventually get there and wanted to get the hang of ecommerce early.
The question grocers should be asking themselves is if the same is likely to happen with shopping via GenAI. For example, is shopping via an intelligent AI assistant that âgets youâ likely to eventually be a better experience than what people have access to now?
So, when it comes to investigating and implementing GenAI, the goal isnât â and shouldnât be â pocketing extra billions tomorrow. Itâs about ensuring resilience and positioning yourself for the future. Remember when Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50 million â but Blockbuster âlaughed them out of the roomâ? You want to stay on the crest of where the market is heading, rather than focusing only on today.
There are lots of exciting and highly promising applications for GenAI in grocery, such as the ones mentioned earlier. Additional survey data from Deloitte shows many grocery execs moving full-speed ahead: eager about GenAIâs potential for managing supply chain logistics and inventory, and citing the most compelling âkiller applicationâ being âacting as a customer assistant.â This isnât just something conceptual; Walmart and Amazon have their own proprietary solutions, and some vendors have begun to offer similar functionality to other grocery retailers.
With such AI-based assistants, shoppers can, as Gartner reports, âsearch using natural language instead of specific product names or categories.â This opens the door for potential use cases like:
These types of use cases just scratch the surface of how grocery retailers may apply GenAI. As you put your figurative eggs in the right baskets for you, keep in mind how youâll stay fresh and future ready.