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Artificial intelligence has the power to help retailers not only maximize their bottom lines, but also streamline the creative process.
That’s according to Michelle Bacharach, chief executive of AI styling platform FindMine. Bacharach told Quartz that AI can be the “ultimate tiebreaker” between a retailer’s quarreling creative and sales teams.
“We think of it a little bit more in dichotomies, like it’s either the brand wins or the revenue wins,” Bacharach said on the latest episode of Quartz AI Factor, a new streaming video interview series filmed on location at the Nasdaq MarketSite (NDAQ+1.86%). “But with something like AI, you can do that little sprinkle, but instead of Balmain and Gucci and Keith Haring, it’s a sprinkle of margin and revenue and the brand.”
At FindMine, which Bacharach founded in 2014 — almost a decade before the AI boom took hold and began to revolutionize the technology sector — AI is trained to behave like a stylist and a merchandiser to help make difficult decisions.
“We’re teaching it this expertise of the brand so that it can produce these high quality inspirational assets around every product and help elevate the customer journey in a way that the brand really would be doing if they had unlimited manpower,” she said. “But they don’t. And so that’s the gap that we help fill.”
Brands and retailers have slowly begun to embrace AI, with several online shopping platforms incorporating generative artificial intelligence into their product recommendations and visual search features.
Bacharach said the highly competitive retail landscape is making it all the more crucial for brands to come up with innovative ways to attract — and retain — their customers.
For example, she said, Nike (NKE-0.04%), Adidas (ADDYY+0.22%), Lululemon (LULU-1.32%), Athleta (GPS), Champion (HBI-2.87%), and Under Armour (UAA-1.54%), are all competing fiercely in the same category. That’s a problem for brands, but also presents an opportunity to think outside the box.
“If you as a consumer feel like there’s no difference between those brands, you just buy whatever’s cheapest,” she said. “And that’s a very dangerous place for brands to be. So they have to differentiate who they are as a brand, what their style ethos is, what kind of lifestyle they want to help you lead.”
As AI continues to develop, the biggest thing Bacharach hopes for is better image rendering that allows customers to virtually try on fashion and for platform like FindMine to no longer have to rely on physically produced images of products.
“That’s really fun and cool and you can do so many things with that, the quality is just not there yet,” she said.
Watch the full episode of Quartz AI factor above.