How PIM and AI Go Hand in Hand

The global product information management (PIM) market is poised for significant growth over the next few years. While the PIM market hit $9.9 billion in 2021 – a testament to eCommerce and omnichannel selling – it’s anticipated that the overall market will reach $16.5 billion by 2026.

What’s the reason behind this astonishing rise? One of the most significant contributors is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) within PIM systems. By combining AI (and machine learning) and PIM systems, businesses can organize and analyse large amounts of data about their products and take decisive, data-backed action across all their selling channels.

Modern, AI-backed PIM systems put the power in the hands of the seller; they can efficiently synthesize massive amounts of data, but with AI, brands can drastically improve the overall quality of product information across all their channels, address incorrect information and inconsistent data, and detect other errors to make multichannel selling simpler and build consumer trust via reliable information.

Emerging technologies like AI and machine learning are changing how we use PIM systems, improving PIM data quality and providing unique insights. Here’s how PIM and AI go hand in hand.

Improve the Quality of Your Product Information

The way customers find products today has changed entirely. Consumers are used to seeing and purchasing products through search-driven discovery.

But especially now, with AI, brands can use product data to create and automate this process – and even provide improved product suggestions to customers, switching from generating product suggestions based on keyword searches to recommendations based on the intention behind their searches. This makes for a much more dynamic product discovery process for customers.

AI’s role in this process is to extract data based on a product’s attributes to classify each one, extrapolate information regarding customer sentiments behind their buying decisions, and manage product data according to set governance policies and guidelines. DecaSIM, an AI integration for LAGO, even funnels this information back into the LAGO system to maximise what you can do with it. Combining AI and PIM can help you connect your customers to inventory that fits their needs and is in stock and offer personalised recommendations to improve sales and build customer loyalty.

Make Product Information More Reliable

Proofing product information data for quality and accuracy is a massive undertaking – especially when you have a long product list, your product information spans your entire organisation, and your whole team needs accurate, updated data. Having inaccurate or outdated product information can jeopardise customer trust in your brand and create significant inconsistencies in marketing campaigns and on different commerce channels.

A PIM system is a crucial tool in addressing the need to keep everyone working (or shopping) from the same product information and with the same data sets; it is an intelligent way to centralise product information like:

  • SKUs and identifiers
  • Titles
  • Descriptions
  • Images
  • Pricing
  • Product quantities
  • And more

AI enhances the process, ensuring that your product information is accurate, high-quality, and ready for internal operations and consumer eyes, while saving you time and money.

With AI integrations, you can make the most of your PIM system by automating tasks like manual item data cleaning and streamlined system searches. You can even use AI to make improvements to product information for things like:

  • Spelling, grammar, and terminology
  • Phrasing for clarity of thought and consistency of branding style
  • SEO and how easy it is for consumers to find your products

Generate Consistent Product Information Faster

With AI, you can create unique product content, training your system to generate product information at scale. Through exposure to your current content, natural language processing tools can analyse your voice and tone and craft product descriptions that match branding and style guidelines.

What’s more, AI makes writing or updating product information much quicker, expediting your overall time to market. This capability allows you to pivot faster when you discover your target audience, tailoring your product information to foster stronger connections and boost engagement.

Automate the Gathering of Additional Product Information

Combining AI with your PIM (and DAM, digital asset management) systems can help ingest structured data about your products and their digital assets. With tools like deep machine learning, AI can analyse your digital assets to identify critical characteristics for these assets and turn them into data for each. This includes things like:

  • Colour, tone, and mood
  • Faces and people
  • Products

This data can then be analysed – with AI and machine learning – to evaluate the efficacy of these assets to learn which digital assets – and which products – foster the most effective connections with your customers, inspire the most purchases, and generate the most revenue for your company. You can analyse large volumes of data about products and who buys them and use these findings to make informed marketing and selling decisions.

When you optimize your product information with AI, the quality and reliability of this data improves – making it easier for customers to find your products and ensure a consistent, positive experience on every channel.

Predict Customer Behaviour, Customise Promos, and Foster Engagement with LAGO

The Comosoft team is all about embracing and making the most of new technologies and opportunities, and that’s why we introduced LAGO with DecaSIM. This AI integration empowers your brand to do things like:

  • Run simulations on customer behaviour to see how they will react to pricing and promotional decisions. This helps you optimize promotions, pricing, and product data to better engage with customers, increase sales, and grow your profits.
  • Understand customer behaviour, detect undiscovered shopping patterns to best appeal to your audience, and even customize promotions to connect with leads and existing customers.
  • Use AI to make data-driven decisions, predict how customers will likely behave for individual promotions, model how promotions for one product will inform buying decisions for other products, and analyse price points—by item and even by week—to determine which promotions will attract the most customers.

DecaSIM’s AI-based tools unify the data from LAGO’s DAM and PIM programs and identify your shoppers’ product preferences. Using this data, DecaSIM synthesizes large volumes of data to derive inferences about your customers and uncovers purchasing patterns faster and with a higher level of accuracy, then returns this information to LAGO. Essentially, it “supercharges” the metadata you use to make multiple versions of each campaign so you can make the most of your marketing efforts in far less time.

You can read about how one of our grocery partners leveraged these tools to increase their sales and even grow profits by 8 percent by adjusting their promotions and weekly circulars by reading this case study.

Ready to make the most of AI and see it in action? Make decision-making simpler, maximize your profits, and improve shopper engagement – all while having more time to take on other initiatives. Book a demo of our multichannel solution software today.