There’s no question which technology everyone’s talking about in retail. Generative AI continues to promote incredible levels of interest with its promise of next-level productivity and new kinds of employee and customer experience.

It’s all happening at light speed. When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it gained hundreds of millions of users in a matter of months. Since then, we’ve seen an explosion of new and improved gen AI models hitting the market, opening powerful new use cases across retail.

But are brands ready to capitalize? Most companies know they need better data to make that happen, but they struggle with making it available, trusted and accessible — not to mention handling complex data, like images, videos and unstructured data.

This is why a solid data foundation in the cloud is now mandatory for every retailer and consumer goods company interested in unlocking AI’s promise.

Evolution, not revolution 

The good news? Retail has a long history of leading on AI. Think back to the ecommerce recommendation engines, pioneered by the likes of Amazon, which redefined personalization at scale. As retailers then expanded their machine learning and deep learning capabilities, they radically improved their data and analytical abilities — shifting from diagnosing past performance to forecasting future needs.

Now, generative AI is offering another step change. Accenture’s latest research shows that 93% of retail C-suite execs are planning to scale up their investment in AI and gen AI over the next 3 to 5 years, in terms of time, money and human capital. It’s allowing people to interact with AI in a way that’s truly human by design, using everyday language and receiving responses they can instantly understand. It means AI can take on new roles for retailers, brands and consumers: advising, guiding, creating, coding, protecting, automating, complementing and augmenting work. 

An advisor for retail employees

It’s an exciting time. But where to begin? Employee support is an ideal ‘no regrets’ place to start. Creating a generative AI virtual assistant for internal knowledge management is relatively low risk and high reward.

Accenture’s latest data shows that half (50%) of all working hours across retail have the potential to be impacted by generative AI. This technology offers a way to give retail employees faster and more easily consumable insights, expertise and know-how. And it can be applied to all kinds of retail tasks — a frontline worker interacting with customers in real time or a back-office employee querying why some stock didn’t arrive this morning.

There are all kinds of other operational use cases to consider as well, such as drafting marketing materials and product descriptions, or performing sentiment analysis across social media and news sources. But, of course, it’s critical to keep a human in the loop. That’s how you ensure gen AI remains responsible, accurate, relevant and brand-aligned.

Conversational commerce

What about consumer experiences? Gen AI’s ability to guide and advise consumers will help retailers evolve from personalization to individualization. Take grocery shopping: Just imagine being able to ask for recipe recommendations tailored to your personal tastes, budget, family size and more — and then being able to purchase all the ingredients instantly as part of a seamless experience.

This is the future of digital shopping, and it’s vital not to fall behind the curve. Solutions are already hitting the market, with examples like Amazon Rufus now being trialed in the U.S. Accenture has also been helping Bricorama, a French DIY retailer, enable a similar service for choosing paint colors and DIY equipment.

Unlock AI with a cloud data platform

The key challenge? Unless brands can develop these services themselves, they’ll lose control of consumer’s buying journeys. So it’s vital to craft solutions that keep consumers within the brand domain. It’s equally important to have access to real-time data from across the business — whether that’s inventory, supply chain or customer insights.

It’s why leading retailers recognize there’s no AI without a strong data foundation in the cloud. And it’s also why the collaboration between Accenture and Snowflake can be uniquely powerful in helping retailers unlock the next generation of AI tools and solutions.

Accenture’s ai.RETAIL offering, for example, provides fully customizable AI accelerators, spanning critical areas, like supply chain, customer insights and workforce management. It’s a way to fast-track AI-powered solutions in everything from product arrangement and availability to inventory and logistics, 360-degree customer insights to optimized staffing scheduling, and more.

When combined with a cloud data platform, like the Snowflake AI Data Cloud for Retail, the impact can be transformational. Snowflake allows retailers to consolidate their historically disparate and siloed data in one place, creating a single source of truth for the whole business, and delivering the ability to share data quickly and securely between different applications and functions — including AI-powered tools.

Adding gen AI to the mix

What’s more, with Snowflake's AI capabilities, retailers don’t have to maintain a separate AI layer within their technology stack. Retailers can use Snowflake to build AI solutions, using both generative and classical AI, right where their data is. That’s not only much faster, but it also allows them to bring the right model together with the right data in the right place.

Over the past year, retailers have been using Snowflake and ai.RETAIL to unlock the latest AI capabilities. With one retailer in the UK, for example, ai.RETAIL, powered by Snowflake, helped build a generative AI tool that can empower retail managers to identify and solve workforce issues, such as scheduling challenges or worker training needs. In another example, employees at a clothing retailer were able to gain insights into stock availability and make more informed decisions about allocation using gen AI.

This is just the beginning. With a solid data and AI foundation in the cloud, retailers can realize unprecedented opportunities for consumer engagement, workforce optimization and operational efficiency. Gen AI and an overall stronger digital core can help retail companies better serve their customers, while consumers benefit from an improved shopping experience tailored to their needs and preferences.

Are you ready to take the leap? Learn how Accenture and Snowflake are paving the way in ai.RETAIL to drive better customer value.