Summary

The consumer grocery shopping landscape has witnessed shifts between online and offline platforms, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. While online platforms initially gained traction, concerns about pricing and quality prompted a return to local grocery shops. Departmental stores now offer a comprehensive range of household items, challenging both online and offline players. Offline shops hold an advantage with competitive pricing and personal connections. Despite potential benefits, digital integration remains a challenge for offline players due to concerns about business control and customer trust. Generative AI has the potential to redefine offline shopping experiences by streamlining processes. Currently, consumers typically prepare handwritten lists, send them via WhatsApp, and receive deliveries at home. This traditional method could be modernized with digital aggregation platforms, benefiting both consumers and offline businesses.

Reference link : https://lnkd.in/gG7utjp9

Overview

We all are consumers of groceries items including vegetables, food grains & pulses. We buy these items on a monthly, weekly or fortnightly basis depending upon our priority & plan. People opt online or offline medium to buy their grocery items. During covid-19, many people switched to online platforms & but due substantial price margin and sometime quality issues, many people again switched back to their local grocery shop in their neighborhood. 

Nowadays grocery shops are being replaced (renamed) by departmental stores having all items of the family’s regular needs. There will always be a race between offline & online shopping methods, at one point of time it looked like online monsters will be able to kill the offline players and they will have the market monopoly in the retail economy. For the interest of consumers, I feel offline players are equally important to have monopolistics check & balance on online player. Quality wise both are at par, do not create great differentiator among consumers. 

In-fact two factors: price-margin and human-connect with local shops go in favor of offline players. I always wanted to see these offline players on a common aggregator digital platform ensuring no-loss & no-fear to their business, but issues like fear of business overhead, trust deficiency for losing customers, fear of being controlled by aggregator platforms are big blockers to digital their business. 

Anyway sometimes things take their natural pace to reach its destination. My focus is to explain how [Generative AI] is redefining the local offline shopping experience, undoubtedly the same approach would be applicable in online shopping experience. Let’s understand the customer journey involved while doing the local offline shopping, as follows :

Offline shopping steps as per today’s perspective

• Step-1 : Consumer prepares the list of items on paper (handwritten only)
• Step-2 : Consumer takes photo of list and sends to local shop via WhatsApp
• Step-3 : Local shop staff packs the items as noted in the list
• Step-4 : Concern person prepares a bill of packed items. (hand-written on same paper)
• Step-5 : Local shop delivers the packed item at the residence along with the bill.
• Step-6 : Inhouse or rented transport is used for home delivery.
• Step-7 : Consumers pay the billing amount online or offline as per convenience.

• Alternatively, sometimes the conventional consumers go on shop to do in-presence shopping and handover lists at local shops and give any direction if needed. Such a conventional approach provides a better human-connect experience. 

Disruption by Generative AI

Considering 7 steps as explained in earlier sections, let’s understand how Generative AI will redefine these 7 steps.

Steps	Possible impact due to redefinition by Gen AI
Step-1 : Consumer prepares the list of items on paper (handwritten only)	Instead of handwritten paper, [a consumer assistant] can be the future which will be a WhatsApp or social media integral feature or a mobile-app installed in a consumer’s device. Consumers will tap the WhatsApp feature or mobile-app to prepare the grocery list using [Speech to text technology].Consumers will [speak item & quantity one-by-one] and confirm each item to be appended in the list.Outcome will be the software prepared item list.Final item-list can be shared with preferred local grocery shop.Refer to the OpenAI enabled [Handwriting to text] generation in the next column.	[Handwriting to text] generationBelow tabular data generated from above handwritten script
Step-2 : Consumer takes photo of list and sends to local shop via WhatsApp	This step will not be relevant, in presence of [a consumer assistance] in future.
Step-3 : Local shop staff packs the items as noted in the list	Not immediately, but sometime in future, human staff will be replaced by [retail shop assistant]. [retail shop assistant] will have two components[Machine robot] as shown in the next column, who will be doing all human work like workers at a shop including keeping items in the [Intelligent shopping trolley (IST)].[software agent] who will be preparing the [digital CART] on the fly. [digital CART] is a software representation of [Intelligent shopping trolley (IST)].The moment [Machine robot] will be at the counter to pay for items placed in the [Intelligent shopping trolley (IST)], Cashier at counter is already able to see the pre-calculated [digital CART]
Step-4 : Concern person prepares a bill of packed items. (hand-written on same paper)	At the counter, the cashier is able to see the pre-calculated [digital CART] in the display. [Intelligent shopping trolley (IST)] & [digital CART] is tallied to avoid any robotics mistake.Consumer si notified for [Bill generation] along with softcopy.
Step-5 : Local shop delivers the packed item at the residence along with the bill.	[Step-5 & Step-6] are interlinked. These steps will remain conventional upto sometime, but there will be huge disruption in home delivery methods.Consumer will be notified for grocery item delivery with expected date & timeConsumers will be notified for grocery items payable bill amount.Consumer can also propose alternate delivery date & time
Step-6 : Inhouse or rented transport is used for home delivery.	Local transports like e-rickshaw, autos or other transportations are used conventionally. Near future, drones are going to disrupt the entire transportation industry, so drones will also penetrate into local transportation for grocery delivery.
Step-7 : Consumers pay the billing amount online or offline as per convenience.	Payment methods have already been transformed into digital payments. Most likely the entire population will be using digital payment methods.So this step will remain the same like today’s digital payment methods for a longer duration.

About author

Profile : Rajesh Verma – Brief profile

Source : link for this article here

Series : S2 (Artificial Intelligence)

Episode : [S2-AIGAI] Redefining the local offline shopping experience using Generative AI

Author’s approach : Rajesh wants to share his learning & experience gained throughout his career from various sources. Author started the series on architectural topics including AI/ML & GAI topics and this article is one of the episodes in that attempt. Author feels that lots of information is available on various forums, but scattered here & there. Episodes in this series will be designed for most of the relevant topics in architecture-&-design, published gradually and organized in logical sequence. Principally episodes will have linkage with other episodes, so that readers can have proper connection among the topics and would be able to correlate with ongoing activities in their software life. Topics for example will be related to functional architecture, integration architecture, deployment architecture, microscopic view of mostly architecture-building-blocks (ABBs), security guidelines & approach to comply, performance KPIs & engineering, git branch & DevOps enabled automation strategy, NFR aspects (e.g. scalability, high-availability, stability, resiliency, etc.), commonly used architecture styles & design patterns, cloudification approaches, multi-tenancy approach, data migration, channel-cutover & rollout strategy, process standardization & simplification, greenfield rollout & brownfield transformation journeys, etc.

Thank you for reading the post, please stay connected.