What: Generative AI is growing in popularity in retail and companies are racing to supply the tools as the technology is set to super-charge the industry.

Why it is important: Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the industry and transform customers’ shopping experience, from customer service to marketing and personalization.

Retail is facing an abundance of AI platforms that use machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, generative adversarial networks, and stable diffusion.

Generative AI is an obvious fit for retail, as shopping is a uniquely human experience that often relies on warmth and relationships. This version of AI has traits that are closely humanistic in how it communicates, serves up information, presents analysis, and creates or edits content.

ChatGPT is one of the most obvious examples, which is OpenAI’s generative responsible for setting off the current momentum.

Since OpenAI released software development tools in March, an explosion of new services and feature updates erupted, as well as competitors.

Google is targeting retail with its technology such as its Google Cloud partnership with Shopify and other offerings such as using AI to develop an apparel try on functionality for fashion search or its code generation and completion tool for creating chatbots.

Companies can also use AI models like Imagen and Chirp to create studio-quality visuals and support speech-to-text conversion in multiple languages

AI also has the potential to revolutionize e-commerce by creating personalized and curated shopping experiences, reducing operating expenses, and increasing speed to market for new products. However, challenges such as data quality, security risks, and the lack of industry-wide standards need to addressed in order to ensure a trusted and effective customer experience.

Researchers at IHL Group estimate that the impact of generative AI on the retail sector will boom over the next several years, hitting USD 9.2 trillion by 2029.

Rise of the retail bots