Retailers who do not embrace generative artificial intelligence today risk missing out on billions of business opportunities, and this revolution is at least as important as the beginning of the mobile economy 15 years ago, according to an analysis published by RetailDetail.

Dawn of an AI Revolution

"When Albert Heijn app users scan an image of a dish from a magazine, that app can decipher what is displayed in the image, extract the ingredients, match them with products from the supermarket chain's range, and create a shopping list from them that you can order immediately.

Carrefour has similar initiatives, such as the Hopla chatbot," says Manas Bharadwaj, a retail industry advisor at Microsoft, who gained experience in the retail sector over the decades in various roles at Ahold Delhaize.

"If you check into a Novotel hotel in Seoul, it will be done by an avatar with whom you can converse as if it were a person. Chatbots can already handle most customer queries and issues without the intervention of a 'real' employee."

Therefore, we are at the dawn of an AI revolution following the momentum of the last six months, according to the expert. "100% of retailers are talking about AI today, and over 40% are actually experimenting with it."

A Critical Turning Point

We are facing a critical turning point: artificial intelligence was already capable of many things, but you needed ten researchers as a company to reach a decent level. Now, even smaller companies can quickly start with these new large language models because they have become so easy to use. "This is a game-changer: you no longer need to train those models in advance; you expose them to your data, and the magic happens already."

Generative AI "humanizes" technology, says Bharadwaj. It will be easier for companies to reinvent their business models. And that will have major consequences:

"We are witnessing a movement similar to when the iPhone was launched: it kickstarted an entirely new mobile economy. Retailers began working on e-commerce, mobile apps, personalization... and from that, many billion-dollar companies were born.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is another platform that allows companies to create billions of business opportunities. So, how do you become the next Uber, the next WeChat, the next Spotify, the next TikTok...? Experiment, innovate. The opportunities are endless!"