Brands today are harnessing the power of mobile app development in a bid to adjust to the new shift being fueled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has slowly engulfed users of smartphones.
While the AI industry is $735 billion strong today, mobile commerce is equally promising, touching nearly $460 billion. The potential is huge.
There are several promising applications of AI in mobile commerce, whose traffic has surpassed desktop visits, and these are useful for online businesses because the number of smart-phone visitors isn’t about to dip anytime soon.
Among these applications include search and navigation, conversational AI and AI for video consumption.
In terms of Search and Navigation, brands that want to profit from m-commerce have to factor in the user interface and ensure a good and memorable experience for the users.
If users cannot navigate to the page they want to, they’ll go to search engines, meaning brands must have responsive websites tailored to mobile designs in order to facilitate smart-phone users.
Search can actually influence your conversion rates, so it is advisable to optimize it for both mobile and desktop-first online stores and/or businesses.
Some core m-commerce audiences are already at home with voice-activated search, which has led to the entry of companies with unique products designed for mobile shoppers, while others offer ready-made site search solutions powered by machine learning for a more natural language search.
Conversational AI is perhaps the most promising application as most smart-phone users have at least one messaging app on their devices.
The most common forms are chatbots and virtual assistants, which are replacing customer care representatives and sales executives, by informing and guiding the customer through the buyer journey towards making a purchase.
AI for video is meant to help offer unique marketing opportunities in m-commerce, seeing as video is one of the most consumed pieces of content and core functions people use their smart devices for, besides messaging.
There are apps that can perform video analysis, even recognizing the mood of each user while they watch your product video and interpret what the person was experiencing while watching it.
This is done using smart-phone sensors and camera to identify the patterns, and although it is quite expensive at this point, it could prove very profitable in the coming future.
Going forward, seamless cross-platform and cross-medium experiences will be the standard for online shopping, powered by AI’s potential.
The infographic below by Mofluid captures the five AI-driven trends that are already shaping the m-commerce scene in 2018.
Photo Credit: Strelka Institute photo Flickr via Compfight cc