The Very Group

Robbie Feather, who was promoted to The Very Group chief executive role in April, says the Very.co.uk and Littlewoods owner is using AI for ecommerce customer experience, marketing, advertising, improving use of data, pricing, merchandising and credit controlling.

“We have been doing some work with Google, and they said our use of AI in some of our digital marketing is among the most advanced they‘ve seen in the UK,” he explains.

“We are very data-driven and we have the advantage that it‘s not just retail data but it‘s financial data on customers. So, we‘ve got an incredibly rich dataset.”

The Very Group reported a 92% drop in pre-tax profit over the year to July 1, 2023, dragged down by operating cost rises. The £4.6m profit came off the back of flat group sales of £2.15bn.

THG

Chief executive Moulding says AI is being used as “a problem solver” as well as driving greater efficiency on the company’s tech spend.

“There are cost savings you get through not needing people to do certain jobs because AI can pick that up – you‘re asking people to do a relatively manual task that you can now fully automate and learn from,” he explains.

The key to AI’s success, Moulding notes, is how it enables retailers to learn and continually iterate operations based on those insights. He argues that from a customer service point of view, there is only a finite number of questions a customer can ask – so once AI has been taught all of them it can find the solutions.

THG also uses AI in the warehouse, with robots continually learning more optimised ways of preparing and fulfilling goods, as well as in pricing – a key area for growing profit margin, Moulding says.

“Probably the biggest benefits we‘ve had so far, I would say, are in the warehouse, in logistics, in automation, in robots, because they‘re doing an immense amount of work every day,” says Moulding.

Notonthehighstreet

Describing her company’s relationship with AI, chief executive Rothwell probably speaks for an industry when she says “we're on the journey, but we‘re probably only just scratching the surface at the moment”.

Within Notonthehighstreet, she says “energy around it has been incredible” after initial hesitance, with multiple parts of the business embracing it and trying to understand what it can do for them.

From improving use of data and, in particular, personalisation and powering internal search to email marketing and paid media advertising, there are a whole host of areas in which AI is being used at the online retailer.

“We are starting to use generative AI in some of our creative practices, so really understanding how we scale those different types of content,” Rothwell adds.

“How can we use it in things like retouching and some of the more laborious manual tasks that would have been happening before? Our technology teams are also using it in their coding practices to help with quality assessment, helping to solve difficult problems.”

Website search functionality is where the biggest impact has been seen, according to the CEO.

“We‘ve seen a direct improvement in terms of click-through rate from search results to product details pages, and we saw this almost immediately from introducing the new improved search. We‘ve also seen a continuous conversion benefit from search so we are attributing this to the AI improvements that we‘ve made.”

N Brown

N Brown is using an AI-powered chat solution online, as well as embracing AI for social-proofing, user-generated content and personalisation in onsite search. In terms of pricing, AI helps N Brown maximise margin revenue and the sell-through of products.

Chief executive Steve Johnson says: “All of our products get set through a pricing tool, which is unique to N Brown – we built it ourselves; it’s called PriceTagger.”

The JD Williams, Simply Be and Jacamo parent company – which posted adjusted profit before tax of £13.3m for the 52 weeks to March 2, 2024, an £8.4m improvement on the previous year despite group revenue falling by 9.8% to £600.9m – has also deployed AI in product development and design, with customer brand avatars created using the tech, as well as in merchandising and advertising.

“From a Gen-AI perspective, we are using it to create product descriptions via our product information management technology – so we‘re quite into it,” Johnson says.

Much of that adoption has come in the last 12 months, so it’s fairly nascent stages and “very exploratory”, in Johnson’s words.

“We‘ve not had any challenges in the deployment of it, but colleague adoption – like anything when something new comes along – some people are early adopters, some people need a bit of help to work in different ways,” he adds.

“It’s not been a major issue; it‘s just the more you introduce these new ways of working, the more you need to support colleagues with it.”

Swarovski

Swarovski UK managing director Craig Ash says the jewellery retailer is using AI for ecommerce customer experience, improving use of data and personalisation, and product development and design. It has also been deployed in merchandising and demand forecasting, inventory management and supply chain.

“We‘re using obviously sophisticated algorithms to allow Swarovski to understand our customers better than before in anticipating their needs and being able to provide more personalised experiences,” he remarks.

A key focus for Swarovski, which posted sales growth of 4% to €1.8bn in 2023, is promoting clientelling in-store – where tech is used by staff to guide customers, upsell and give colleagues access to historic transactions and interactions with shoppers. AI is playing a role in this core part of Swarovski’s current strategy.

“Certainly in customer-facing areas, such as clientelling, we see a higher value per transaction where we‘ve used AI to enable our teams to make more informed recommendations and product choices,” Ash reports.

“While AI has a part to play in the retail journey, it‘s important that it doesn‘t overwhelm customers. You know, it can obviously generate insights to support decision-making, but it‘s ultimately the human that has the final word.”