IRP Commerce
Nominated Award: Best Use of AI in a Consumer/Customer Service Application
Website of Company: www.irpcommerce.com
IRP Commerce is headquartered in Belfast with offices also in Dublin and London. To date it has transacted over £2 Billion of ecommerce transactions from 170 countries for companies based in Ireland.
IRP provides an ecommerce platform focused on merchant net profit. The system is engineered is the only platform engineered to control costs, grow sales and deliver net profits.
Reason for Nomination
DeepAgent
Five years ago, IRP Commerce began a research programme to experiment with AI in ecommerce with a project called ‘DeepAgent’. We constructed a machine learning framework and began to work out what we could do with it. What we needed to do was to supply it with information to see if we could make it do something useful — in our case to increase ecommerce sales.
The results were spectacular. With data and AI we realised we could predict who the buyers were on a website and, subsequently, intervene when someone might be a buyer and needed a nudge.
We were able to systematise these machine learning insights to indicate actions that would further increase sales. In all the areas we were looking at — from conversion rates, to automated bidding on PPC, to who should be doing marketing services for which client — DeepAgent was ultimately going to outperform people. By adopting AI technologies like DeepAgent to do the work (as opposed to people), more sales and profits were guaranteed.
Many of the challenges in ecommerce share a similarity with chess. They are in the ‘NP’ class of computation problems. We cannot be sure if a move is right or wrong because the problem cannot be solved in a time period. However, one move can be a much better move than another — and some people are very good at playing the ecommerce game.
In the end, as with chess, AI machines will ‘play ecommerce’ even better than the best people.
So what is the future of AI in ecommerce? Like most other areas of work, the future will see increasing AI automation and machines taking over what people used to do. From online marketing, to conversion, to email marketing, to linked selling, every major area in Traffic, Conversion and Retention faces automation by AI augmented systems.
Increasingly, people will be there just to keep an eye on things and to oil the AI ecommerce machine.
Additional Information:
IRP has conducted long research into ecommerce using machine learning. The results are clear to see in the balance sheets of the companies we do business with. AI can seamlessly blend with their online trading – in the way that stock markets have gone with automated trading machines taking over – so it is with standard online buying and selling of merchant inventory.