An Ikea executive has said that AI is “enhancing, not replacing” creativity in its retail operations, as the technology can boost the customer experience.
Speaking at The Edge Summit in London today, Ikea’s chief architect Garima Singh pointed to the retailer’s initiative dubbed ‘Ikea Kreativ’ as an example of enhancing creativity.
“You can take a picture of the space that you want to innovate or design, and then you can completely erase the room and redesign it with the help of an AI-powered digital assistant,” she said.
“You could also select a sofa or chair from our catalogue and place it (in an area) that will suit the room best.”
She added that the feature helps customers to virtually design the space and enhance customers’ creativity with “AI as their co-pilot”.
Ikea is also using AI for other customer-facing applications, as well as to improve the efficiency of internal operations and sustainability targets.
Being an early adopter of AI, Singh said that the reason why the tool was first introduced several years ago was to help Ikea become an omnichannel retailer.
“The idea from the beginning was to build an experience that we were giving in-store, but then give the same Ikea experience digitally,” she said.
“Our metrics when we launched (AI) was to see the customer satisfaction rate, how many customer visits are we driving in the app and the web and how many of them are we actually converting to sale?”
She said these key performance indicators meant the process became “simplified, seamless and unified. We really combined our offline to online, and online to offline, to build a seamless shopping experience.”
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