With Memorial Day weekend just around the corner, the historic standoff between industry behemoths, Amazon and Walmart, is getting an AI-fueled facelift. Both enterprises are using advanced AI systems to increase customer satisfaction, fine-tune pricing strategies, optimize supply chain and process large-order data easily as well as to boost sales during this important shopping season.
Amazon’s Memorial Day sale starts this weekend and spotlights how powerful AI can be in personalization. Customers are welcomed by products that are being personally recommended to them, based on their browsing history, previous purchases, and even real-time shopping history. AI algorithms process mountains of data to forecast demand for items, prompting the optimal amount of items on hand and price changes that respond to competitor deals and buyer attention.
In addition, the company’s vast logistics infrastructure — which includes AI-driven robots and route optimization — guarantees that your Memorial Day purchases from Amazon will be delivered quickly and efficiently. Their artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant, Alexa, is also making an appearance, providing personalized shopping recommendations and easy voice purchases.
Walmart is hardly far behind in this AI arms race. Their Memorial Day discounts also illustrate how they are strategically embedding AI to make it an essential part of their touchpoints. In addition to AR and voice tech, AI-driven coding assistants have allegedly refined their website and app UX for a smoother browsing and purchasing experience for shoppers who are in holiday gifting mode. Walmart is using AI with customer feedback, so that it can make adjustments to its offerings and customer service on the fly.
Their massive investment in micro-fulllment centers, informed by geospatial data and AI, enables faster delivery options that rival Amazon’s superlative logistics capabilities. What’s more, Walmart also opening up an API for retail ad-tech companies is an indication that it plans to use AI for more personalized and efficient advertising during the Memorial Day rush.
The influence of AI exceeds the periphery visible to the customers, and exists throughout the sales events. Both Amazon and Walmart are turning to AI to improve their supply chains, forecast potential disruptions and manage inventory more efficiently, in order to keep popular items available over Memorial Day. So while back-end AI orchestration is definitely in play here- keeping the price points competitive and being ready for the predicted orders spike, there is a lot more to it than just that.
For customers, that means that the current AI-energised scramble is playing out as a more personalised, efficient shopping experience — complete with a broader selection of deals and even speedier delivery. But it also underscores concerns over data privacy and how the algorithm could lead to bias in product recommendations and pricing.
As AI advances, its impact on the future of retail, especially during peak shopping times such as Memorial Day, will be even greater. The fight for your dollars this holiday weekend is not only between retail giants, but also between their computer systems.
