There is no getting around it: the role AI plays in business grows more important by the day, and that goes double for anyone running a shop. If you own one — a restaurant, a clothes shop, a barber's, anything at all — and you want to put AI to work effectively, here are the benefits and the ideas you may well not have come across before.
First things first: what exactly is AI?
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It is a processing technology connected to very large databases, which lets it take instructions of many kinds and process and analyse information efficiently. That is why it is now applied across so many industries: finance and transactions, investment in shares and funds, travel, marketing, science and medicine, manufacturing, security — and businesses with a shopfront, too.
The benefits of using AI in a bricks-and-mortar business
As mentioned above, AI is useful in a great many ways and can be applied to almost any kind of business. So today we are setting out the benefits of using AI in various kinds of shop. They make interesting reading, and they will certainly leave shop owners doing less of the tiring work while sales and profits go up.
1. It finds the new trends that will impress your customers
The online world is the key to business success these days, and bringing AI into it makes impressing customers that much easier — social listening tools in particular, which watch what is happening across the internet through keywords, hashtags and viral posts. You do not have to sit and read through a mountain of material yourself, because the AI analyses it for you and tells you what is gathering pace and which trends are worth bringing into your business. It is an excellent way to impress customers and build an image that appeals to a modern audience.
2. It creates content and adverts for your online marketing
Want to make an advert or a piece of online content but cannot think how to write the caption? There is no need to labour over it, because there are plenty of ways to put AI to work, and one of them is using a language AI platform such as ChatGPT or Bard. Feed it your instructions and the system will process them and write the advert for you automatically. A few small adjustments and it is ready to use.
3. Robots that serve food to your customers
Anyone running a busy restaurant will have run into food going to the wrong table, or simply not having enough waiting staff. AI answers this need too, in the form of serving robots that can make their way around the restaurant and deliver food to the right customers. The staff only have to prepare the food and set it on the robot's tray.
4. Recognising the faces and behaviour of your target customers
AI can recognise people's faces and features using facial recognition. The system can detect the faces of customers coming into the shop and track how they behave: which kinds of product interest them, what they buy particularly often. It makes personalised marketing far more accurate.
5. It is useful for R&D on your products and services
If you want the business to grow its sales, do not forget R&D — research and development. AI helps you analyse data on how customers spend and on the trends relevant to your business, and, importantly, that can lead you to better products.
Ideas for applying AI across different kinds of shop
- Coffee shops and restaurants: leave staff less worn out by having robots serve the food, so the team can focus on other work and do it better.
- Clothes shops: analyse fashion trends and suggest ways for customers to mix and match what suits them.
- Salons and barbers: design new cuts, hair colours or nail colours that suit the customer, and generate a simulated image of them with that cut or colour.
Raise the standard of your shop with an all-in-one POS from Qashier
Beyond applying AI in your shop, if you want to make the business more professional and easier to run — so that wherever in the world you are, you can watch over every outlet in real time — let us introduce the all-in-one POS: a till and complete store management assistant that makes running the shop straightforward, with functions like these.
- Taking orders and checking stock levels
- Selling, ringing up the bill, printing receipts and summarising the day's takings
- Running sales promotions, both offers and membership schemes
- Accepting several kinds of payment: credit card, cash and bank transfer
Interested in a till and POS system with every function you need, suited to running any kind of shop, from Qashier? Contact us for more information on LINE Official: @qashier.th or call 02-544-0267 and our specialists will be glad to help and answer anything you would like to know.