How Suning Uses AI and Big Data to Revolutionize Retail
Suning's COO explains the dual challenges of building AI capabilities and reshaping business processes, detailing how massive store data, algorithmic models, and personalized AI-driven product selection have boosted accuracy by up to 20% and paved the way for AI experience stores and an agile C2M supply chain.
“AI and new technologies must be deployed in an industry, which presents at least two challenges.”
On November 19, at the TechCrunch International Innovation Summit, Suning Technology COO Jing Wei addressed questions about the development of Suning’s AI Retail Brain.
He identified two key directions: first, the construction of AI capabilities, encompassing algorithms, computing power, data, and industry‑specific scenarios; second, the adjustment of business processes, requiring business units to participate in data selection and labeling, a significant challenge for the organization.
Using product selection as an example, Suning needs a year’s worth of data from 4,800 stores to label and feed into a model. Without reaching this data balance point, the gap between historical and real‑time data is large. Moreover, a single product determines a store’s sales, making each trial a challenge and a learning experience for the business team.
Currently, Suning operates over 10,000 stores and offers roughly 40 million SKUs. By applying AI to store‑level product selection and delivering weekly personalized recommendations, the company has improved selection accuracy by 15‑20%, generating substantial benefits.
Jing Wei outlined three priorities based on retail and consumer goods: “the closest to demand,” “the closest to experience,” and “the closest to data.” He emphasized the importance of linking consumers and households to the manufacturing end, creating a fast, agile supply chain, and focusing on C2M (consumer‑to‑manufacturer) end‑to‑end integration, believing AI and big data will make life increasingly better.
Suning plans to roll out many AI experience stores next year, offering interactive, personalized services such as breakfast composition analysis and product suggestions delivered by robotic arms.
He also noted that in 2019 Suning will share its AI Retail Brain platform with industry partners, breaking corporate boundaries and providing new opportunities and development stages for Chinese retail.
Suning Technology
Official Suning Technology account. Explains cutting-edge retail technology and shares Suning's tech practices.
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