AI Use Cases 

Conduct "digital human" conversational interface with customers in physical locations (e.g. banks such as Natwest, soul machines). The aim is to provide effectively online functionality via some form of automated, robotic interface.

Using cameras in, for example, retail sites to categorise potential customer's demographic data - typically sex and age. This potentially raises customer response, ethical and legal issues, unless carefully managed.

Identify customer emotional sentiment in branch using facial expression analysis. This may be misleading as cause and effect are not always clear cut and the risk of false positives is high.

Manage brand reputation by scanning social media to discover references to the company or products or key individuals. This may be supported with sentiment analysis - although this can potentially be misleading (e.g. 'humorous' memes can be misinterpreted).

Identify and categorise known customers when they enter physical retail site to ensure prioritised service (e.g. alerting relationship management team to premier customers). This has to be carefully (and legally) managed to ensure customer sensitivities around product deployment,.

Enhance business relationship management through generating customer insight and personalised recommendations (improved information flow to operative through ML analysis / personalisation of product and proposition / recommendation - potential suppliers include Accenture, Squirro)

Analyse credit worthiness of under-banked individuals to provide banking services. Typically this involves understanding and monitoring behavioural patterns.

Identify most profitable consumers through data analytics

Predict and promote the next appropriate offer for a customer to maximise chance of driving desired behaviour (e.g. sales, click-through, retention offer acceptance etc).

Customer response to warranties generates a lot of data that can be mined to predict potential specific quality issues and to predict risk across the product portfolio.

Product layout in stores can be optimised to improve sales yield, customer satisfaction and operational effectiveness.

Building subscriber income is a key part of many media publisher strategies - especially as print disappears, online advertising pricing pressure increases and 3rd party traffic generators like social media sites or search engines change their algorithms at will. Whilst these conversion rates are typically in low single percentage points any increase can drive significant revenue to the bottom line. Typically the models will score customer propensity to respond to different types of advertising and commercial propositions, perhaps at different times, and offer these up accordingly. For many sites this will also drive the cut-off moment for free access. This is a shift to a more flexible variant on traditional Freemium (some content is free, some paid for), Metered (a certain amount is free) or Hard (everything is charged for) models.

In the race between online marketers and people keen to avoid being marketed to neural networks have been deployed to subvert ad blocking software (by, for example, working out which images might avoid being blocked). Ad blocking software has increasingly deep penetration amongst consumers which poses a challenge to online publishers. Subverting ad blockers is unlikely to be the last lap in this particular race.

Inventory Management - helping company calculate how many units are required where and when. This is precisely the sort of complex, data-rich, prediction-heavy closed loop where AI can potentially excel if the data tracking is accurate - so long as the unexpected does not intervene.

Based on customer's media interests and viewing history, automate the creation of the media image (e.g. from a movie) that is most likely to drive click-through to the media product - although the technique has wider uses in optimising the purchase funnel in ecommerce.

Provide valuations of second hand products. Typically this will be based on market prices being applied to individual products offered for sale. Absent specific sample details prices these may be a base for negotiation rather than a fixed price (e.g. in second hand vehicles).

Use customer behaviour pattern data to predict and recommend media content that customers will want to consume. This may be further optimised to business imperative - for example what will enhance likelihood of subscription renewal rather than instantaneous gratification.

Analysing the basket of products that consumers purchase - typically in one go but also on a broader timeline - provides ample data to enable predictions on potential cross-selling and repeat purchases.

Being a news anchor involves the single task of reporting - essentially reading out a script. Therefore, AI can work for automating news presentation on TV and other media, using natural language generation and processing.

Classify visual information from in-store video to collect data on product placement, consumer response and activity and other key data points for use in market research

Predict cannibalisation risk to support overall market proposition - thus ensuring that product management is better positioned to optimise yield and revenue capture.

Automating the collection of customer data including product preferences, demographics, and personal information. This data may be collected under the guise of a loyalty program or app, with AI being used to extract the relevant information.

Musicians have historically used innovative ways to create their music, such as digital and electronic music - but the limit has always been their muse. Generative AI can be used to create songs, melodies, and instrumentation by being trained on previously recorded music. The results can be tuned to match artists' unique characteristic genre and style - for example creating music in the style of a long-dead master.

Monitoring and predicting shrinkage enables retailers and consumer product companies to crack down on potential value loss.

Automatically generate content for marketing materials

Emails that are tailored to individual behaviour

Determine where brand is being used appropriately and inappropriately.

Determine the optimum target list who will respond to campaigns.

Understand customer sentiment and prioritise social media messages for response. Potentially suggest automated responses to help increase agent productivity.

Using scripted data capture to generate company logos for start-ups and similar smaller players. Typically married to support from human graphic designers.