Many supermarkets and consumer goods manufactures are using AI platforms, like image recognition, to gather data which can deliver actionable insights to help identify the optimal shelf positioning of products, the trends of the shelf, availability and the performance of rival brands.
Take, for example, the issue of out-of-stock items. Typically, if a consumer is looking for a product that's out of stock, they will substitute another item 70 percent of the time. However, on the second out-of-stock occurrence, the shopper is equally likely to substitute, make no purchase or go to another store. On the third occurrence, 70 percent will simply go to another store. If a retailer has the ability to act quickly to avoid a product becoming unavailable, then it will avoid losing sales. Retailers cannot afford to lose customers because they don’t know what’s going on inside the store environment.