One of the hottest topics at the moment in the world of business is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Love it or hate it, worry about it or feel excited, AI is here to stay and is embedding itself in an increasing number of aspects of our lives. Predictive text, self-service checkout cash registers, advanced security checks at the airport, and chatbots are just a few examples.  Large tech companies such as Google and Microsoft (News - Alert) are investing heavily in new AI initiatives, so it’s not going to be long before AI has a serious hold on the marketplace.

If you run an e-commerce business, there are a variety of ways you can use AI to your advantage. It can be used to better understand your customer, generate new leads, and enhance the customer experience. You might be worried that AI solutions are too complex or not right for your brand. They’re actually easier to use and apply than you think.

Here are 7 ways in which AI can help your e-commerce business.

• Predicting Sales – AI is able to help you predict your sales or services. What would have taken hours poring over large sets of data can be done easily using AI. It’s possible to find your customer behavior pattern and predict what your customer wants. Netflix has perfected this aspect of using Artificial Intelligence and suggests what a customer wants to watch.  
• Enhancing Customer Service – one way of using AI to enhance customer service is with the use of chatbots. Assistance will be available for your customers 24/7, and it also speeds up the response time, frees up humans for more challenging tasks and enables customers to receive a solution for the most common problems or questions.
• Optimizing Searches and Recommendations – one of the most popular ways of using AI in the e-commerce sector is optimizing searches and recommendations. More and more shoppers are choosing to use their mobile devices and to take advantage of this, you need to optimize your search box and recommendations. Mobile shopping trends are indicating that 73% of e-commerce sales will be made on mobile devices by the end of 2021, and you can find out more by visiting www.oberlo.com.  
• Automating Back-Office Processes – many back-office processes can be automated, reducing the number of errors and saving time.
• Voice Assistance – AI offers customers a more interactive and pleasant experience when they visit your e-commerce store. A more personal and human touch is offered because users don’t need to type every time. Instead, they use a voice assistant.
• Virtual Personal Shoppers – AI is enabling brands to create purpose-built ‘shoppers’ to assist their customers online. Customers are able to use this type of service to discover items they’re looking for rather than going through a time-consuming process of ticking boxes and entering keywords.  
• Provide Trending and Personalized Content – you don’t have to guess what your customers want to see because machine learning and artificial intelligence can help you scale up your content according to customer pain points, channels, countries and brands.

If you want to have a competitive edge and remain relevant in the future, you need to make use of AI whenever possible.