Marketers Lean Into AI-based Image Search

Retailers From Burberry To West Elm Embrace The New Frontier Of Customer Experience Via Artificial Intelligence.

- Cortney Harding

Trunk Club, an apparel subscription service owned by Nordstrom, has increased Pinterest engagement by more than 100 percent in recent months by embedding artificial intelligence into its digital-images marketing. AI-image search is central to its ambitions of building a data-science model that drives highly relevant product offerings to consumers across the social web. More broadly, the effort speaks to how AI search is quickly becoming the retail sector’s next big digital shopping experience.

“We are trying to understand how one pair of jeans plays out against another pair that was released in another season,” explained Justin Hughes, vp of product development and design at Trunk Club. “We want to get really granular and understand what really works.”

Retailers are excited about AI because the latest smartphones have created a Snapchat-inspired social world where consumers are starting to see “the camera as the keyboard,” added Ron Palmeri, CEO of Layer, the tech company powering Trunk Club’s search capabilities.