Right now, it seems like AI is in every headline. So much so that many merchandising and content teams may be worried about their role alongside artificial intelligence. But teams shouldn’t fret about AI replacing their talent and skills anytime soon. The initial focus should be shifting your teams’ approach and learning how to use the new tools available to enhance your work and make your day-to-day work easier. 

Here's a closer look at how AI will evolve Merchandising across these three concepts.

Personalization: AI is raising the bar

Prepare to witness a paradigm shift in personalization. This transformation will involve real-time analytics supercharging your strategies and platforms with AI integrated throughout – Salesforce Einstein is a great example of this. Merchandising will also see the incorporation of third-party tools such as dentsu’s Merkury, which can be leveraged to identify a broader customer base, gain insights, and segment effectively. The ultimate objective is to enhance the customer journey with the tailored and enriched experiences AI can bring to the table.

Site Optimization: Intelligent tools are trending

Imagine optimizing your website at-scale with cutting-edge intelligent platforms and tools – transforming the entire user experience. “Searchandising” can tailor your onsite search experience, predicting user queries, and delivering AI-driven recommendations rooted in individual shopping histories. With the right AI toolset, you can drive customers to next-best-action suggestions according to your data. This means more meaningful content, better product advice, and more cohesive data management.

Economy of Scale: Streamline with AI

Merchandising operations are transforming, in a good way. With AI as your ally, you can leverage the tools for labor-intensive tasks and streamline your processes. You can evaluate large amounts of data for optimization, from sorting rules to content enhancement. AI can even step in to shoulder the weight of manual effort. Tools like ChatGPT can be used to analyze trends and fine tune your homepage performance. And for content creation, tools like Jasper will be your friend for scaling content development.

It’s important to remember AI is not magic. But, when leveraged strategically and thoughtfully, AI presents the opportunity to improve how we merchandise an ecommerce experience and how we optimize site content. With more data points combined with AI, Merchandisers can drive more value all while being more efficient. 

At Merkle, we use platforms like Salesforce and Adobe to maximize AI features for our clients. As an agency partner, Merkle plays a vital role in setting up and using third-party tools, ensuring we deliver improved efficiency and better results.

The fusion of AI and innovative tools promises a transformative future. Thanks to AI’s potential, merchandisers can move forward with confidence, anticipating enhanced efficiencies, the ability to drive more personalized experiences, and greater ease in operations – allowing human expertise to shine.

Connect with our experts for support on integrating AI into merchandising.