Eraspace: Revolutionizing Retail Industry Using Artificial Intelligence

Rhapsody Budiono, Head of Application Development at PT. Erajaya Swasembada, Tbk

Rhapsody Budiono, Head of Application Development at PT. Erajaya Swasembada, Tbk

Eraspace is part of Erajaya Swasembada, an Indonesian public-listed company that is the largest lifestyle distributor and retailer with more than 1800 offline stores across the country. Since the pandemic, the trend shows that online shopping is growing rapidly, and it is becoming the new norm. Eraspace’s goal is to have a unified shopping experience through the omnichannel.

Now, where does AI come in, and how would it help our business? There are three main points on their contributions.

Personalizing Customer Experiences

Nowadays, customers want to have a personalized experience. Knowing how to tailor recommendations, content, and preferences will lead to a higher chance of customers purchasing our products. We can achieve those by utilizing big data we built from their past purchase history and even their browsing behaviour. Once we have enough data, we can do a segmentation analysis and see their pattern. For example, what is the correlation between someone browsing luxury bags and purchasing an iPhone? Acquiring customers is important, but what is more important is to retain them.

Implementing generative AI in the form of a chatbot will provide instant customer support, which will improve the experience while reducing labor costs.

Optimizing Operations

With thousands of orders a day, it is inevitable to implement AI in our supply chain and operations. In order to scale up, we need to help the users. The most common issue in retail is fraud. Implementing AI algorithms based on our data modeling can detect patterns of fraudulent transactions, thereby reducing financial losses due to fraud. Moreover, it is common to have manual and repetitive admin work when running operations. This can lead to human error due to multiple factors. The solution that we have implemented is to automate the order process.

Companies should consider challenging their leaders to develop a road map which includes AI in it because sooner or later AI will be part of our daily lives and once implemented we are more likely to see the benefits.

Improve Decision-Making

In order for us to make informed decisions and adapt to market shifts more effectively, we need to analyze historical and real-time data. Of course, the quality of data will determine how accurate the predictions are. Most companies have not adapted big data and AI, and their homework is to have their data collection relevant. This process begins with the collection of data from various sources. It is likely that the raw data will often be messy, incomplete, or contain outliers. Once everything is consolidated in one data warehouse, the next process of data preprocessing can begin. Cleaning and transforming data into a usable format is a key point that plays a crucial role in the accuracy of the predictions.

In conclusion, we are early in artificial intelligence, and most people just have a glimpse of it; however, it is obvious how AI can bring value to businesses. Companies should consider challenging their leaders to develop a road map that includes AI because, sooner or later, AI will be part of our daily lives, and once implemented, we are more likely to see the benefits.