Forrester on AI in Retail

Could not agree more, its not about things like image recognition. Its first about automating business process with deep and transparent data.   And insert the pattern recognition if you need it. 

AI In Retail? Nope — Start With Automation
Rob Koplowitz Vice President, Principal Analyst
Sucharita Kodali Vice President, Principal Analyst

Stories of thrilling, new AI use cases in retail have been popping up in our tech news feeds, whether computer vision, facial recognition, or elimination of human workers. But these sensational accounts miss an important piece of the AI learning curve. A complex infrastructure of end-to-end process automation underpins the flashy technology reflected on the front end.

Process gaps shatter customer journeys and lead to a lack of transparency in supply chain and customer interactions, which together form a composite of the AI backbone. If your retail organization suffers from process gaps and manual routing — and 37% of business and technology decision makers report that they are — you must start with laying the groundwork before leaping to AI bling.  ... "