Besides the question “How to grab the attention of customers and make them want to buy from me rather than from my rivals”, every day, managers, marketers, merchandisers and sales representatives are faced with a large number of other questions – regarding the display of goods on store shelves:

• Are my products placed on shelves uniformly and coherently across multiple stores in accordance with the planogram?
• Are products placed in the order demonstrated in the planogram?
• Are all product items (SKUs) present on the shelf?
• Are product labels facing the consumer?
• Are products surrounded by complimentary items to drive cross selling?
• What is my competitive environment?
• Are all my goods affixes with price tags?
• Has the retailer leveraged promotional shelf labels?
• Are signs, banners, and shelf dividers adequately visible?

And so on.

Timely and accurate answers on the questions above are extremely important to improve the inventory turnover, increase sales volume, skillfully manage items with irregular demand (e.g. seasonal products), and effectively manage contract obligations compliance.

Will you please count the number of SKUs in the photo above in a couple of seconds by eye? How about determining the share of shelf for each product category and comparing the data with a planogram – yep, with your own eyes, but accurately and quickly?

Here’s where Artificial Intelligence will help you out!

In 2,5 seconds AI will recognize and count the number of SKUs, share of shelf, conduct planogram compliance and detect inconsistencies of product layouts. An automated inventory management system can also help businesses keep track of their stock levels automatically with minimal human intervention. How long would it take your sales rep to manually calculate these metrics?

Computer vision in AI is the development of automated systems to interpret images in the same manner as people do. Computer vision technologies are extremely sophisticated and developing quickly. They are capable of coping with merchandising audit (retail execution) tasks not only much more quickly, than a human eye, but also more accurately than the human brain.

Artificial Intelligence and Retail image recognition are coming to store shelves, delivering almost instant access to data captured by field representatives and enabling stakeholders gain smart vital insights into what’s on their shelves and make better evidence-based decisions almost in the twinkling of an eye. 

To be continued.