November 4, 2020

Emarsys Launches AI Stylist for Retailers – a Level of Personalisation Even Amazon Can’t Achieve

Omnichannel customer engagement platform Emarsys today launches AI Stylist, a digital personalisation tool for online brands that not even Amazon is capable of.

AI Stylist is the first tool of its kind that can truly deliver an automated personalised experience for every single customer for a brand. The tool makes automated product recommendations to customers based entirely on the intricate behaviours and preferences of individual customers, rather than the generic assumptions of segmented personalisation, increasing the chances of driving online sales.

The tool works by building up a detailed bank of product data through AI, and a detailed bank of customer behaviour and preference data, and then matches products to appropriate customers on any channel.

One the product side, AI Stylist uses Google Cloud’s image recognition technology to examine the properties of a particular product, recognising specific characteristics that humans may miss. For example, for a clothing retailer, AI Stylist would recognise materials, textures, colours, patterns, fitting, and more for dresses and shirts available on the retailer’s website. AI Stylist then cross references this with the behaviours of each customer that indicates a preference for certain features, with every new product viewed or purchased adding a new point of reference that helps to contextualise genuine interest in a product.

As it uses visual recognition, AI Stylist eliminates the need for a human to manually tag product images or provide written descriptions for products — especially helpful for big department store brands that sell thousands of continually changing products from multiple brands under one website.

This unprecedented level of personalisation can enable brands to drive huge improvements in sales and customer satisfaction, using the findings as context to develop their product range. Sales can improve by introducing more products that possess the most popular characteristics for a consumer base, while specifically promoting less popular items to those who are actually interested in them will drive sales too.

In the long-run, the ability to tailor stocks to people’s exact specifications will also help reduce wastage and streamline supply chains. To stay with the department store example, the customer profiles that AI Stylist creates can reduce operating costs by informing decisions on products, facilities, and transportation, as well as enabling more efficient in-store operations. It would also reduce CO2 emissions and reduce landfill waste.

AI Stylist has enjoyed a successful trial with Sports Direct, impacting millions of the brand’s customers. Within the first few months of using AI Stylist, Sports Direct has recorded a huge increase of 10 per cent in web traffic and 20 per cent in email engagement.

Paul Gunn, Head of Digital Marketing and CRM at Frasers Group, the parent company of Sports Direct, said, “It’s about shifting from thinking about broad terms like ‘demand’ to the individual preferences and need of individual customers. One of the things that COVID highlighted was the fact that trends are very difficult if you’re always looking at them in retrospect, and AI Stylist enables us to automate in a way that recognises trends as they’re being created.”

Raj Balasundaram, SVP of AI, Emarsys, said, “AI Stylist is the forerunner for the next level of personalisation, incorporating some really leading-edge techniques in terms of image recognition and artificial intelligence. Being able to personalise on a genuinely one-to-one level with customers, based entirely on their behaviour and preferences, is something that even Amazon can only dream of.”