Fast Retailing, a Japanese retailer and Uniqlo’s parent company, has decided to implement Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) and other technological solutions for transforming itself into an information-driven manufacturer and retailer.
With the help of this technology, the company plans on closely monitoring the sales data of individual items and developing a production system in response to that. Also, they plan on incorporating customer preferences into its production practices for increasing the customer satisfaction level.
All this is an initiative towards its plan to make clothing that is tailored to customer’s preferences and delivered to stores or homes within 10 days of the order date.
“We have 130,000 employees worldwide, and if we can proceed with planning, manufacturing, and selling in parallel, we will only need one-tenth the time we are spending now. Google has the technology we are looking for,” said Tadashi Yanai, Chairman, and CEO, Fast Retailing.
Moreover, with the use of such technology, the company wants to meet the competition from big retail global players like fast-fashion chain Zara and online giant Amazon.com.
Apart from this, the company has been using Google’s image recognition technology for forecasting the demand and product trends. Also, the Japanese apparel retailer came up with the Google-developed service, ‘Uniqlo IQ’ for helping the customers select and coordinate the item on the Uniqlo App. The system has a rich database on customer’s buying preferences and it also collects feedback from the shoppers.