How to Harness AI to Craft a Unique Customer Experience: Retail Legends

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Retail Legends podcast. This program’s mission is to provoke thoughts, challenge ideas, encourage growth, and offer leadership and insight to promote prepared and proactive retail. Host Nicole Leinback Reyhle kicked things off at the National Retail Federation’s 2020 Vision Big Show in NYC with interviews with Brian McGlynn, Vice President of Commerce at Coveo, and Max Rhodes, Co-Founder, and CEO of Faire.

Coveo is an AI-driven experience commerce platform. As McGlynn puts it, Coveo’s mission provides a million different customers with a million different experiences. But what does that mean? “We make sense of information and digest it to make it personalized,” McGlynn said. Coveo deploys AI and machine learning to transform datainto the type of valued personalized information, and shopping behavior retailers can use for promotions and all kinds of smart marketing to consumers.

The personalization theme carried over to Reyhle’s interview with Max Rhodes. Faire is an online wholesale marketplace that brings small business owners and independent makers together where they can buy and sell wholesale online. This approach allows independent retailers to grow and take advantage of big-box terms while offering simplicity to their wholesale business.

One of the barriers for smaller retailers in using online wholesalers was dealing with inventory management. Faire mitigates those risks with free returns on items that don’t sell and net 60 terms for buying products. “A maker is anyone who manufacturer’s something or makes something themselves to take to market. I like that term maker because it gets to the heart of Faire’s mission to power entrepreneurs and the people behind these smaller businesses,” Rhodes said.