Top 10 Data & AI Use Cases for Retailers

How Retailers Deliver on Their Brand Promise    

The retail industry  has undergone tremendous change over the last several years.  Consumer expectations have shifted permanently, the global supply chain has demonstrated its importance, and staying ahead of global regulations has never been more challenging. And of course, AI has taken the business world by storm. 

While historically retail winners excelled at optimizing labor, real estate, and inventory, modern retailers win with data and AI. Retailers who manage, govern, master, and deploy data most effectively are thriving and growing with brand recognition and loyal customers. Despite the strategic pivot to data and AI, most retailers are still serially underinvested in technology and technical skills. They’re overwhelmed by technical data accumulated over time, living in a world of “do more with less.” Given real-world constraints, how do modern retailers leverage data and AI to deliver on their brand promise?

Maximizing Business Value with Data-driven Decisions

Retailers must lead data and AI projects tied to business value and anchored to their company’s most important business imperatives focused on topline growth, bottom-line profits, or tangible efficiencies. One of the biggest challenges for many companies is where to start, which use cases to focus on given finite budget and resources and the need to show the business value of projects. Since 9 out of the National Retail Federation's (NRF) Top 10 Retailers use Informatica to confidently leverage data and AI to achieve business goals, Informatica created a Top 10 Retail Data and Use Cases Guide as a map to the most implemented use cases that drive business value across our global retail customer base.

What are the Top 10 data and AI use cases in retail by Informatica customers?
 

The 2024 Top 10 Retail and AI Use Cases:

1. Customer Loyalty - Create a single view of the customer across all customer data sources (Loyalty, Credit Card, Service, etc.) while ensuring accurate householding and address validation.
   
   
2. Customer Engagement - Personalize customer engagement with clean and accurate customer and product data infused at any customer touchpoint (i.e., contact center, digital applications, and store tech for frontline workers). 
   
   
3. Marketing and Advertising - Increase return on ad spend (ROAS), customer lifetime value (CLV), and return on investment (ROI) on campaigns with clean and governed customer and purchase data. Fuel retail media networks with clean and trusted data for maximum profitability.
   
   
4. Omnichannel Commerce - Manage a dynamic product catalog and onboard new products quickly with clean and accurate product data, driving sales conversions through a consistent shopping experience across channels with product and supplier traceability.
   
   
5. Sales, Inventory, and Returns - Determine near real-time sales and inventory levels with confidence throughout the store and supply chain network. Determine the root cause of returns with data.
   
   
6. Supplier Management - Onboard suppliers in hours and minutes instead of weeks and days. Quickly source new suppliers and manage spending across first, second, and third-tier suppliers.
   
   
7. Warehousing and Transportation - Meet supply chain service level agreements (SLAs) through comprehensive oversight, allowing for the precise localization of assets throughout the distribution network, whether situated within a warehouse, aboard marine vessels, land vehicles, or aircraft.
   
   
8. Supply Chain Collaboration - Share sales, product, and logistics data with key trading partners while governing partner data, protecting sensitive internal data, and seamlessly managing complex Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport (EDIFACT) data.
   
   
9. Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) - Ensure financial planning is timely and accurate with clean, governed data. Protect financial data and rationalize systems during mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures.
   
   
10. Regulatory Governance, Compliance, and ESG - Ensure Customer Data Privacy, get ahead of compliance regulations (GDPR, CCPA), ESG Compliance Reporting, and Regional Traceability Requirements (FSMA 204).

Data and AI can be leveraged in almost any use case. The Top 10 Use Cases are the most common in retail across Informatica’s vast enterprise customer base, helping retailers deliver on their brand promise to their customers – driving tangible business value.  For a deep dive into Informatica’s Top 10 Retail Data and AI Use Cases tied to real-world customer examples that demonstrate business value, please take a look at our Top 10 Retail Data and AI Use Case Guide Ebook.