AI for Retail

CHAPTER 26How to Run a Proof of Concept Bake‐off Effectively

“But our AI is better!”

Everyone

Let's say you have followed our advice and have a very clear AI strategy and road map with identified clear AI use cases, you have clear commitment from the organization/finance/IT to go after that use case with vigor. What do you do next? How does your AI execution team find good vendors, conduct a quick and accurate POC, and get to a rollout decision quickly? I have broken out the most important steps in a POC process that follows.

How to Select AI Vendors

Once you have identified your most profitable problems and rank‐sorted by expected impact, you will need to identify several technology solutions and vendors that promise they can solve that problem.

Since you already have the business case lined up, you should have very clear KPIs and success criteria for the POC. The success criteria if hit should clearly prove your business case, e.g., double stocker productivity, increase ordering accuracy, reduce shrink, increase sales.

At this stage you must identify the requirements of the solution for it to achieve the success criteria. What features do you need? What accuracy is actually required? What bandwidth constraints do you have? What other constraints do you have?

Your AI executor should get each stakeholder that will be affected by the technology to write down what is important to them so you clearly define your requirements and success criteria up front. So many retailers ...