Shopping Gets More Conversational: How AI Is Changing The Experience

Read Kathleen Walch’s article in Forbes about how AI is making shopping more conversational.

A few decades ago, if a person wanted to buy something they had to physically go to the store and hope the item they wanted was in stock. However, the nature of retail has been greatly changed by e-commerce. Now one can view an almost limitless amount of items and purchase them instantly without even stepping out of their home or office. The Internet and the world of e-commerce that was created and further enabled by mobile has made it such that you can now go from wanting an item to having it in a matter of hours without ever stepping foot outside your home or office and you also have access to a much larger selection of goods.

But this isn’t the endpoint of the evolution of e-commerce. The pervasiveness of chatbots and voice assistants are making it so that ordering something is now just a matter of uttering a phrase like “Reorder toilet paper” and it’s possible to go from urgent situation to problem resolved in a short amount of time. Many companies have seen the opportunities enabled by conversational technology and are building platforms to help customers make purchasing even easier just by using their voice or text. These systems speed commerce as well as help maintain personal touch with customers before and after the purchase. The field of commerce enabled by AI that uses voice assistants and bots for e-commerce is often referred to as “Assistant-Enabled Commerce”.

Read the full story here.