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Generative AI Retail industry use cases.

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the retail industry by offering innovative use cases. The retail sector is directly linked to consumers, and it is one of the largest industries from a revenue point of view. According to Emarketer, the "total retail sales worldwide in 2023 are expected to come in at $29.7 trillion with the 5.5% annual increase."

With the revolution in Generative AI, the number 1 agenda at the moment in every organization is how to leverage the AI in their organization; it could be in any form, and this situation is being stormed by the vendors who sell such technologies to the customers with the conferences, workshops, sales talks, new product launches, etc. Therefore, it is becoming a challenge for every executive at a different layer of the organization to do something with the Generative AI.

Let's try today to find out a few areas in the Retail Industry that are the candidates for the Large Langage Models use cases and if we can spot any early adopters from the publically available sources.

Before going into depth on the use cases, we need to follow specific basic rules to spot the use cases for Generative AI. As we have gone through such situations earlier for determining relevant use cases for any industry, the following vital traits must be kept in mind rather than just rushing to do something on Gen AI.

1. Consumer Centricity: Focus on solutions that enhance the customer experience.
2. Operational Efficiency: Look for areas where efficiency can be improved.
3. Scalability: Prioritize solutions that can be scaled across the retail chain.
4. Innovation: Consider emerging technologies like Generative AI and novel applications.

According to Gartner's Use-Case Prism on Generative AI for Retail, there are 20 use cases shortlisted based on the value and feasibility documented.

1. Enhanced Search and Upselling
2. Social Media customer sentiment
3. Supply chain optimization
4. Customer order substitution
5. Conversational Chat Interface
6. Associate hiring and onboarding
7. automated text creation
8. social commerce
9. customer-centric merchandising
10. Personalization for customers
11. Best-fit apparel technology
12. Product development selection
13. automated image creation
14. skills management for associates
15. customer behavior modeling
16. customer subscription services
17. Dynamic pricing for products
18. Immersive retail experience
19. Real-time pricing
20. co-creation of products

News & Updates...

This week has seen a storm of new AI features and products announced, fueling the technology revolution.

1. ​Voice and Image as input to ChatGPT: The use of the new voice technology capabilities for crafting realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech—opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications. Vision-based models are embedded to interpret images.
2. ​DALL·E 3 for image creation is coming to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in October.
3. ​Microsoft Copilot to Windows 11, Bing, Edge, and later part of Microsoft 365.

Oracle Cloud:

• ​Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI service with the Cohere partnership.
• AI vectors to Oracle Database 23c, AI Vector Search, consists of vector data type, vector indexes, and vector search SQL operators that enable the Oracle Database to store the semantic content of documents, images, and other unstructured data as vectors, and use these to run fast similarity queries.

AWS Cloud:

• Amazon Bedrock general availability: a managed service to offer foundation models from leading AI organizations, like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Stability AI, and Amazon.

Google Cloud:

• ​Generative AI journey with a 10-step plan

Potential of AI

• ​Economic potential of Generative AI: an article from Mckinsey
• ​Generative AI risks and potential​

Things to Know

• ​AutoGen: a framework that enables the development of LLM applications using multiple agents that can converse with each other to solve tasks.
• ​Mistral 7B: most powerful language model for its size to date

The Opportunity...

Podcast:

• This week's Open Tech Talks episode 116 on 'Bridging the Gap: How Prompt Engineering is Revolutionizing ChatGPT Interactions'​

Courses to attend:

• ​List of Free Learning Resources In Many Languages​

Events:

Virtual event LLMs in Production​

Tech and Tools...

• Run Stable Diffusion on Apple Silicon with Core ML
• ​Plane An open-source software development tool to manage issues, sprints, and product roadmaps

Until next week,

Kashif Manzoor

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The opinions expressed here represent solely my own personal conjecture based upon experience, practice, and observation and do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans, or strategies of my current or previous employers or their clients/customers. The objective of this newsletter is to share and learn with the community.