Retail is undergoing a digital revamp like no other, as customers become the new king in the age of digital commerce. Retailers need to focus on building authenticity and trust - as they look at enhancing the customer experience.

At the recent SMU Retail Centre of Excellence (RCoE) Asia Retail Leaders Conference 2021, Shantanu Bhattacharya, SMU Professor of Operations Management, shed light on the impact of digitalisation on the retail supply chain.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is simultaneously an older, established technology and a newer, rapidly developing and emerging technology. How can it be both old and new? The ability to write software programmes that could do more than “compute” numbers — that could use AI methods for logical inference to prove logic theorems and solve algebra problems with symbols instead of numbers, goes back to the 1950s. The first chatbot was created in the mid-1960s using the AI methods available at that time.

The term “digital transformation” is not new, but a buzzword adopted by businesses, organisations and even educational institutions currently embracing digital tech transformation in the bid to improve their operating processes and systems. In most public and private sector operational policy, digital transformation is considered essential to an organisation’s success today, as it is intended to revolutionise how work gets done and data is applied. 

As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) gains traction across industries today, it is often forgotten that the use of statistical models and algorithms have been around for decades. Credit bureaus, in particular, have long been using these techniques to generate credit scores which are then used by banks to assess an individual’s creditworthiness. The real game-changer therefore, is the introduction of smartphones, social media, geo-localization models and other interconnectivity devices that make new types of data available for use within these models.