Visual AI Emerges as key technology empowering brands to win over shoppers
Nadav Kadosh, VP Product, Syte
In our latest interview, Syte VP Product Nadav Kadosh shares insight into how visual AI is changing the face of customer experience.
“Visual AI has become a game-changer for brands and retailers, especially in today’s competitive market,” said Nadav Kadosh, who is VP Product at Syte, the leading Product Discovery Platform for retail.
“This technology, which allows machines to recognize and analyze objects within an image, is now critical to the underlying infrastructure for eCommerce websites, enabling them to optimize business performance, improve UX, and reduce inefficiencies in dozens of ways.”
According to Kadosh, visual AI has taken off in the retail space over the last couple of years in part because of the marked improvements it provides in three core areas: search (both visual and text-based) and discovery, personalization and product recommendations, and catalogue optimization and inventory forecasting.
“By enabling shoppers to intuitively find what they’re looking for by simply uploading a photo, they can seamlessly pivot from real life or social media to your store,” said Kadosh. He went on to explain that the same technology that enables the image analysis behind visual search also provides more accurate text search results. It does so by scanning all the images in a retailer’s product catalogue and creating comprehensive tags and metadata for every item, describing each of its visual attributes and their synonyms. This, along with technologies like natural language processing, ensures that search results are relevant and accurate, increasing conversion rates by as much as 6.4X, according to recent data from Syte.
When it comes to personalization, the impact is similarly impressive. “Without visual AI, it’s virtually impossible to provide a truly personalized customer experience,” said Kadosh. He clarified that what most brands and retailers think of as personalization is, in reality, more like segmentation, using historical data to make statistical predictions.
“Visual-AI-based personalization is unique in that it analyzes the details in the images of products that each shopper interacts with, along with a much more granular data set. This means that brands can truly understand and respond to each shopper’s unique style and intention.”
Finally, Kadosh added that visual AI presents new opportunities to improve trend forecasting and optimize retail supply chains, thanks to the wealth of granular data on the specific styles shoppers want (or not). “You can understand, down to the details, what it is shoppers are looking for and predict trends accordingly,” he said.
“It’s these unique capabilities that are making visual AI such an important part of the innovative brand’s eCommerce toolkit in 2022 and beyond.”
