Step into the future: How John Lewis can incorporate AI

“If they do it really well I don’t think the customers will even know it’s happening. Everything will just feel natural and smooth and I don’t think they’ll remove partners from the process. You’ll still feel like you’re interacting with people wearing green,” says Dan Hughes, principal product and strategy lead, at Beyond.

This month John Lewis announced a five year agreement worth £100m Google Cloud to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve its retail offering. While the announcement was light on details it still represents a big step into the future for the John Lewis Partnership.

With the increasing influence of AI and ML in retail and across other industries it remains to be seen what kind of effect it will have on businesses and customers alike.

What it may look like

How AI can be used to shape retail experiences is still somewhat unclear but as an expert in the field and someone who has worked for John Lewis in the past, Hughes is uniquely positioned to offer insight into this.

Hughes believes that John Lewis will try to streamline their processes to allow partners to spend more time tending to customers. He firmly believes that the company is not looking to replace humans rather make their jobs easier.

“I think for John Lewis there’s two streams of activity where you’re gonna see AI really come to life. The first is about freeing people up to kind of do the human element. John Lewis’s big selling point is that it’s a partner owned and partner led business and it’s the partners and specific skill sets and individual service that they are able to provide that really brings the business to life and differentiates John Lewis.

So it’s about equipping them with information, but also being able to make quicker and better decisions in the moment for their customers. But it’s also about operational efficiency. One thing we often talk about is being proactive, not reactive. So that’s where being able to predict and flag where customers are going to want support or where you should intervene and make better decisions for John Lewis, especially, is gonna be really interesting,” he states.

Alongside AI Hughes believes that John Lewis will also harness Google’s machine learning capabilities to try and get a full picture of a customer and how it can tailor its retail offering to better suit them.

“Something that I know John Lewis has been doing is that they’ve been trying to build out a complete view of their customers and understand how customers operate within various big moments of life. The company has changed their tagline from “never knowingly undersold” to “for all life’s moments”, so they want to be tied to those key moments in life,when you’re going to make certain buying decisions.

That’s certainly where machine learning can step in, to provide that analysis of customer behaviours, and work out where the company can intervene to be a partner to you in those key moments,” he explains.

The potential pitfalls

Like with any new technology there are going to be growing pains for any company when it comes to implementing it. This is especially true when it comes to AI as we are still exploring the capabilities and limitations of the technology.

Hughes explains that for any company processing data will be a huge hurdle to overcome.

“For John Lewis, the biggest problem will be the volume of data that they’ve got to be able to fit in to build out clear pictures of what they want. John Lewis has a large business, and it goes back a long way but the data quite often is siloed. It’s in different systems and it’s not structured in a way that is easily digestible by machine learning.

“So it’s getting all those ducks in order, which is a difficult task. Because then the AI becomes meaningful. Until you’ve got that it can be a distraction I think to a business, because it’s not necessarily giving the best results that it can,” Hughes states.

Being an old legacy company will also come with problems when trying to implement this new technology. As Hughes previously mentioned the company will have lots of data that will be stored in a number of different ways in a number of different places as the company has evolved over the years which will make the transition more difficult than for a younger company which will most likely have a far more efficient data storage model.

A further issue John Lewis may face is the fact they have partnered with Google. Hughes states that when John Lewis gets involved in deals like this it usually makes sure that it is the biggest client to whatever company it partners with allowing it to get a bespoke service, however this will not be the case in this partnership which may cause problems.

“It’s possible because from a technology point of view, you’re playing with the same stack as everybody else. But it’s how you implement it and if they invest in a focus on the service design and understanding the end to end journeys and how that capability can map within that journey to provide a better customer experience, it will work. I would expect John Lewis to do this because it’s not an off the shelf solution that you can just plug in and off it goes, you’ve got to work out where it benefits your business,” Hughes says.

Overall this deal represents a huge step into the future for the partnership and could help refresh a brand that has had difficulties in the last couple of years.