Artificial intelligence dominated discussions among the world’s leading retailers, who meet this week in New York.
More than 40 thousand people and 1,025 exhibitors participate in Retail’s Big Show, an event promoted by the National Retail Federation of the United States (NRF), considered the largest global fair in the retail sector.
“I’ve been coming to the fair here in New York for over 20 years and, generally, two or three topics are dominant. But this year it seems like it’s monothematic: everyone only talks about artificial intelligence”, said Fred Trajano, CEO of Magazine Luiza.
If before the objective was to be where the customers are and bring the physical store digital, now the guidance of the sector’s gurus is to win over not only the customer, but the artificial intelligence apps. .
“If customers search using AI and natural language commands, and their data isn’t ready to be discovered right away in the Gemini experience [inteligência artificial do Google]you will not appear. And if you don’t show up, you don’t become an option and you don’t enter the race,” said Debra Langsley, venture capitalist and advisor to the NRF.
The advisor added that companies have become accustomed to using keywords to “tag data” and gain relevance in the digital environment. “Now we need to tag our data with the type of text a customer would use to search an AI platform,” said Langsley.
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Google announced a new feature at the fair that promises to revolutionize sales, the Universal Commerce Protocol (UPC), which allows customers to complete the entire purchasing journey through its AI tool, Gemini. .
The trends are followed by Brazilian businesspeople, who attended the fair in New York in large numbers, with around 2,500 representatives. It was possible to hear conversations in Portuguese in practically every corner of the Jacob K. Javits Event Center, the huge pavilion where the fair was held in downtown Manhattan.
Fred Trajano led the panel “New Business Models: How Retail Organizations Evolved into Business Ecosystems.” The CEO of Magalu talked about how he created his virtual agent, Lu, more than 20 years ago, when chatbots were still a novelty to be discovered in retail.
“The best salesperson I’ve ever met was the founder of the group, my aunt Luíza. I created Lu do Magalu, our digital influencer, in 2004, in honor of her. And I wanted to take this experience of human warmth online, but the technology wasn’t ready at that time”, said Trajano, in an interview with CNN Brazil.
The CEO states that with the expansion of artificial intelligence agents and the arrival of LLM — artificial intelligence models trained to understand large volumes of text and generate human language in a contextualized way — the technology has become more assertive and intelligent.
“Finally, Lu can now do what my aunt Luiza did 60 years ago, which is to serve the customer by providing an experience that is not only frictionless, which is what happens on the internet, but enchanting, which was only possible in physical retail. Or was only possible until now”, Trajano pointed out.
In addition to interacting with customers, AI is being used to facilitate internal processes.
Newton Ribeiro, partner and advisor at the Casas Pedro emporium, states that the Rio de Janeiro retailer has made significant progress in data collection with the help of artificial intelligence tools, which are replacing “classic BIs”, traditional data analysis panels, with pre-configured reports and graphs.
“When analyzing and consulting the results of this Christmas compared to last year, for example, whether we sold more cod or less and the margins, instead of using classic BIs, we use a platform similar to an internal ChatGPT. This makes everything much more intuitive and facilitates queries”, said Ribeiro.
Although research has already revealed the impacts of AI on the job market, at the fair businesspeople defended the productivity gains of new technologies.
Erlon Ortega, president of Apas (Associação Paulista de Supermercados), for example, ruled out layoffs in the sector.
“On the contrary, I think this is even a legend. The sector, in the state of São Paulo alone, has 37 thousand vacancies open today. AI comes to help with productivity, to help with the complexity of retail and improve the expansion of our business”, he said.
Trajano also stated that the idea “is not to reduce jobs at first”, but to increase the productivity of people who are working and revenue per employee.
“I don’t know if it’s a bit because it’s politically correct, but that’s what I heard in practically all the artificial intelligence talks here at the fair”, added the CEO.
