IBM bolsters Commerce platform with more cognitive muscle
IBM announced new cognitive and cloud capabilities within its IBM Commerce platform that allow marketers, merchandisers and e-commerce shops to plug into vast amounts of consumer data to deliver more personalized customer experiences.
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Technically speaking, IBM is embedding some of its cognitive expertise into the IBM Commerce bundle of services.
On the customer front, IBM's Real Time Personalization platform, part of the IBM Cloud for marketing, was updated with a Cognitive Rule Advisor. The advisor learns from customer visits to suggest personalized offers that should be shared with each store visitor. Over time, machine-learning algorithms fine tune the process to make the experience more individualized.
On the backend, IBM's Commerce Insights offerings were treated with a cognitive upgrade to offer merchandisers a real-time view of their business. For instance, the revamped Insights suite's new cognitive-powered category sequencing capabilities will automatically place products on a web page based on current demand and inventory.
There's also new cognitive technology baked into Commerce Insight's anomaly detection tool that can recognize spikes and dips in sales and identify the reasons behind them, such as pricing and social sentiment. Then, it recommends a new course of action based on the real-time data.
"Today we continue to invest in building our portfolio which includes new cognitive solutions that will help completely transform how companies serve each customer," said Harriet Green, GM of Watson IoT, Commerce and Education at IBM. "Businesses will be able to quickly understand, reason and learn from every customer interaction -- and put that knowledge to use to uncover new opportunities from insights."