How to Use AI With Purpose in Retail

Kasama × SCAYLE Commerce Engine

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Jul 20, 2026

Retailers don’t need another chatbot. Across industries, leaders are seeing AI pilots fail by not delivering the results they were promised. But AI can be transformational for retail.

To make an impact, AI needs to have a specific purpose. You need to fund AI like any other transformation, with results at the core of your strategy. The goal is to:

Increase customer conversions
Increase speed and efficiency for your teams
Offer customers unique experiences that give your brand an edge

Some AI solutions may be specifically designed for just one of these three goals. But your AI investment can incorporate multiple needs, too. The customer experience and driving conversions come first, but as brands try to navigate economic uncertainty, changes in consumer spending, and doing more with fewer marketing resources, reducing expenses and speed to market are critical.

Using AI Across Customer Touchpoints

One of the most difficult challenges for brands is delivering the personalized experiences that customers crave at scale. There simply are too many touchpoints for teams to do manually.

Consumers expect brands to know and understand them, and have little patience when brands forget. This is even more true as LLMs become trusted advisors and retail storefronts must compete.

AI is creating increasingly intelligent storefronts that know customers and deliver the products and experiences they want. For example, SCAYLE’s AI-powered recommendations can visually analyse a product and autonomously suggest true-match items on the product detail page (PDP). So brands can spotlight the right products at the right moment to increase shopper engagement and sales.

Creative development and marketing can be a massive undertaking for brands with a wide range of products. AI can create more product content that’s more personalized to shoppers. It can also help you showcase products in real-life scenarios or deliver more targeted and relevant promotions and deals based on customers’ shopping behaviors. Consumers shouldn’t have to struggle to find your products. Then, once they make a decision, ensure they have a painless checkout experience.

Using AI to Enhance Your Storefront

It’s fascinating to see how AI can enhance your customer interactions in retail, but it’s important to remember that some of the biggest positive effects that AI can have on your efficiency and effectiveness come without any customer interaction.

The goal for retailers is to make the buying journey as quick and seamless as possible. To do that, you have to remove any friction in the buying process, specifically on your storefront. This is where AI and automation should come into play.

Leverage AI to optimize product page descriptions and provide consumers with all of the relevant information they need: dimensions, fabrics, cleaning requirements, the list goes on. Consumers don’t want to have to dig for that information on your page.

This level of detail also ensures LLMs can read, understand, and recommend your products to shoppers on their platforms. In this era of agentic AI, if you don’t show up on ChatGPT or Claude, your brand can’t stand out.

AI can help make sure your content is clear and easy to find. Another important strategy is to provide real-time inventory and fulfillment visibility, and offer consumers alternatives should their primary option not be feasible at that time.

Case Study: The SCAYLE Fashion Photo Studio

SCAYLE Commerce Engine has found a way to incorporate each of the three goals we mentioned at the start of this article into one new solution. As part of its suite of retail-ready AI features, SCAYLE recently launched SCAYLE Studios, an AI Fashion Photo Studio that helps brand teams create content in minutes, while also increasing customer engagement.

How does it work?

Snap one photo on a smart phone of the product. SCAYLE Studios creates a digital version of the item and generates product description data that can be used on PDPs.

Style the garment on an AI generated model. Either select from their collection or upload your own.
Choose from a range of different poses and sets. Instantly generate selfies for social media, product shots, campaign assets, and even videos.

And the results are impressive:

Time to market cut by 95%
Production costs reduced by 90%
Shopper engagement increased by 10%

ABOUT YOU, one of Europe’s biggest fashion marketplaces, was able to generate more than 40,000 assets in just one month using SCAYLE Studios. This is what retailers should strive for. You increase engagement and conversions by providing a tool that makes their shopping better and do it using a tool that lets you do it cheaper and faster. That’s where you gain ROI.

How to Get Ready for AI Success

Simply implementing a layer of AI on top of a faulty foundation isn’t going to solve your problems. AI can’t work on its own. All of those strategies mentioned above require two major factors: clean, centralized data and a tech stack that works as a cohesive unit.

Start with your data. If your data is not clean and organized, no AI solution is going to be able to work with it. It’s critical that before you make the investment (both from a financial and resources standpoint) in AI that you have an ecosystem that will not only support it, but also let it flourish.

That’s why it’s crucial to take care of the basics (your customer data, product data, order management processes, etc.) before you add AI into the mix. Otherwise, you risk upsetting customers further by placing another layer on top of an unstable foundation.

So, if you’re still wondering whether you should be moving forward with an AI strategy in 2026, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’ – just make sure that you can: