Mar 26 Learn About The Impact of AI and Big Data in Your E-commerce Business

Big data is, well big, and it’s growing exponentially in the modern world within nearly every business and social field. Floods of information from increasing worldwide mobile device use, social media activity, browser and website tracking data, information from consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices and even data from simpler devices such as RFID tags in products people buy all create big data.

They all combine together to create a mountain of consumer behavior information that amounts to the equivalent of 10 thousand Libraries of Congress per year. That’s just for the U.S market, and that quantity is only growing.

How Big Data, AI and Ecommerce Marketing Connect

In few places can big data be used as profitably and effectively as in the world of ecommerce and ecommerce marketing. Many companies are already aware of this and reacting accordingly. This is why the impact of AI alone on marketing is expected to exceed $40 billion per year in the next 4 years.

There’s one main problem with all of this though, and it’s is that the sheer flood of data being made available to marketers and business owners requires a whole new approach to handling so much information.

This is where AI comes into the picture because it’s the only practical solution to dealing with complex, interconnected data sets that no conventional software and much less any human team could process into actionable pieces. Before we get to that, here’s a brief definition of both Big Data and AI that might clear things up a bit.

What is Big Data

As mentioned above, big data consists of the vast flood of structured and unstructured data points that are collected by different applications, business interactions, social media activity and online tracking activity on the web or Internet of Things from devices of all types. Mobile, transactional and browsing data from customers, in particular, are major sources of ecommerce-relevant big data that can become exponentially large for any organization that handles services or products for many users.

In addition to data created by a business’s interaction with its existing users and potential new customers through different mediums, there are also enormous troves of structured, already organized data that can be bought from brokers for any number of different niches.

Many ecommerce businesses can make use of both their own internally created data sets and externally obtained data to predict growth areas and changes in consumer behavior. Doing this then theoretically allows them to deliver better customer relations, a better product or service delivery and improve their customer acquisition strategies.

Effective, usable artificial intelligence is a crucial part of how ecommerce or other businesses can make big data work for them.

What Is AI

Artificial intelligence has been under development for decades and essentially consists of intelligent algorithms and the devices that use them working to analyze human behavior in intelligently reactive ways.

Current focuses of AI technology include:

• Human behavioral analysis
• Speech recognition
• Business problem solving
• Data categorization and cross-referencing
• Machine learning of fuzzy logic

These are just some of AI’s uses today and among these are where important developments in making artificial intelligence understand human behavior are happening. One major problem of AI has for decades been that it does not live up to the hype of its own supposed intelligence. The artificial part has been there for a long time, but the intelligence part has frequently fallen flat when it came to profitable use, especially in the business landscape, where AI has to be geared at understanding highly subjective human behavior.

However, this weakness is changing and even more importantly, AI is finding a useful place in the world of organizing big data in actionable ways even if it’s not yet perfectly calibrated to the fuzzy logic of human consumer thinking.

In this particular area, where AI and big data combine, many businesses have already had impressive results for their strategy, work efficiency and exploration of new ventures according to poll data.

What Big Data And AI Can Do For Ecommerce

Ecommerce in particular is a wide-open space for improved results through big data and AI. Big data, either generated by an ecommerce company by itself or bought from even larger sources of complex data sets isn’t particularly useful if it can’t be analyzed and used to create a strategy. Since the very nature of big data makes it far too large rapidly-changing for human examination, usable, effective AI solutions are a crucial tool to have.

Combining these two in an ecommerce setting can deliver two key developments that increase brand strength and customer satisfaction with a brand.

Predicting Individual Customer Preference, And Incorporating It

First and foremost, any company dealing with clients of any kind hopes to deliver an experience for those customers that are attuned to their desires, needs, and behavior preferences. In order to now do this in a way that was never possible in the one-size-fits-all past of big commerce, the company must apply its own internal big data resources and possibly those obtained from relevant external sources to an effective AI platform.

If the AI part of this equation has been effectively trained to deal with human behavior and organize diffuse consumer data based on patterns of real consumer preferences, any ecommerce platform that uses it for customer interaction can begin to map unstated customer intentions. In terms of increased sales and opportunities for expansion, this is a major advantage for any business.

Predicting Consumer Trends, And Working With Them

Secondly, big data that passes through powerful enough AI analysis can be shared and used actionably in real-time. This is a vital development for making usable sense of extremely diverse, complex data sets that change constantly as new social tendencies, fashions, fads and consumer preferences crop up in our accelerated 21st-century world.

For ecommerce, combining constantly updated big data with an AI platform in ways that can deliver both of these above developments, will make an enormous growth difference in the coming decades.