On today’s episode of The AI in Retail Show, Trevor speaks with Ricardo Belmar, Director Partner Marketing Advisor for Retail & Consumer Goods at Microsoft. They discuss the current landscape of technology in retail, and the areas in which AI can make an impact, like on accelerating product design and creating more personalized CRM messaging. They also discuss the current opportunities for retail media, how and where stores can implement more screens, and how brands will leverage retail advertising in the future.
Topics discussed:
- Ricardo’s extensive career in retail, managing network, WiFi, and digital signage services for stores, before moving into software and landing at Microsoft “where I now look across the whole spectrum of retail technology.”
- Examples of how AI can be used to benefit retailers, including summarizing customer reviews and accelerating the product design process.
- How Microsoft is focusing on assistive, responsible AI by adding Copilot technology to its services.
- How AI can benefit CRM strategies by creating personalized messages and templates based on in-house customer and business data.
- How AI technology can help improve supply chains, improve sizing challenges, and help solve the returns problem.
- How more retailers are adopting digital screens because of greater variability in screen offerings and lowering costs.
- The growing opportunities brands have today to leverage in-store retail media for their advertising.
Quotes:
“We’re all consumers every day in some way. We all interact with retailers, we all interact with retail technology, whether we realize it or not, right? And we’ve talked about that before too. How transparent is the technology from a consumer standpoint? I just find that to be the most fascinating thing and that’s what keeps me going in this industry is finding more and more ways to enable new technologies, both for the brands and the retailers, to do it as transparently as possible from the consumer’s point of view, but still getting the benefit from that technology.”
“There’s some interesting folks working in the returns area using AI tools to analyze why things are returned so you can try to prevent them. … The returns problem has really hit critical mass for the industry and it’s not getting better.”
“We’re only just starting to expand [retail advertising] to in-store mediums. A lot of this has historically been driven by ecommerce and online digital channel ad units and search ad units. But we’re just starting to see the impact in-store, and the investment is coming now in-store.”
“So there’s so many different ways now you can implement the screen. That’s what was missing in the past and the cost of that had to come down enough to be more interesting for retailers to invest in.”
“Now that marketing has been so much more integrated into the technology as a whole that’s in the retail business, all these things are converging where retail media has exploded on the digital side, it’s now coming into the store.”
