‘AI is going to put your previous manual personalisation efforts on steroids’: Q&A with Adobe’s Scott Rigby

We sat down with Scott Rigby, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager to talk about intelligent commerce and what brands and retailers need to know about getting ahead of the competition.  

What does ‘intelligent commerce’ mean?

Personalisation is personalising an experience for an audience group, for example: over 50, new customers, etc. Individualisation is utilised to personalise an experience at a one-to-one level for a specific individual, for example: Jess Smith.

To stand out in today’s world, brands need to move past generic experiences and start to understand the data they collect and apply it at scale to deliver individualised experiences. Businesses can’t have a one-to-one conversation with their customer if they have manual input into every campaign. This is where AI comes in by using various machine learning capabilities to analyse real time customer data (historical behaviour, product comparisons and more) and business data (available products, margins, etc.) to package and provide intelligent commerce experiences to customers at scale and velocity.

Where are we headed? How will AI continue to evolve to create a more individualised experience for consumers? 

AI is moving us to the point where the unique customer experience is created on the fly. We will pull multiple data sources together to have best understanding of what to offer our customer next and we will then use AI to write the code for that experience on the fly in milliseconds.

What short term results will retailers see after implementing AI strategies?

Across every metric, we know that personalisation delivers an uplift in sales conversion and sales order size. AI is going to put your previous manual personalisation efforts on steroids. The short-term results should be an uplift across your KPI metrics. As your business starts to understand the benefits AI brings in delivering superior experiences to customers, it will give you a competitive edge and free your staff up to do more long-range thinking and planning.

For brands and retailers that don’t invest in AI Powered Commerce and personalisation, what’s at stake? 

The likelihood is that your brand will struggle to compete and become marginalised as customers shift to brands that better understand their current service needs through superior data analysis algorithms delivering better results.

In 2021, retention is more important than ever before. What’s the connection between personalisation, individualisation and loyalty? 

Through Adobe’s own 2021 Digital Trends report, we saw that over 2020, customer behaviour became very fluid and loyalty to brands dropped. Customers sought out brands that served them best in the right channel at the right time, in their time of need. It could be argued that personalisation, individualisation and loyalty are part of a funnel customers move through. Initially brands might group a prospect into a personalism segment and treat them as part of a group. Once we have some PII information that allows the brand to treat and identify them as an individual, we take it to a level of one-to-one individualism. And as they progress through to converting, we then continue to re-engage them at a one-to-one level as an individual to evolve them to a loyal customer.

There’s a perception that AI takes out the ‘human’ element. But in what ways does AI personalisation deliver a more human experience?

I’d argue the reverse, that AI frees up businesses and individuals to allow them to be more human in their customer communications. Why do something that will take you three hours when a computer can do it in a couple of seconds? Humans are better at being creative, empathetic, innovative and strategic. Let’s use technology to help augment (complement) what we do, and let computers automate (replace) what we’re not good at. We can use our skills to deliver more emotionally impactful creative to engage customers with our brands but use computers to work out how to best deliver that into market at speed and scale to deliver the best business outcome.

Are you leveraging your data effectively? Are you getting new consumers AND keeping them? If the answer is ‘maybe’, then watch Adobe’s session with Power Retail. Learn how AI-powered commerce can help you with:

– Improving your digital customer experience

– Simplifying and streamlining merchandising

– Delivering intelligent fulfillment

Click here to watch From “Personalisation” To “Individualisation” New AI-Powered Commerce