Outsourced DPO – AI in retail environments

The BBC ran an interesting story today about AI in retail environments https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54522442 which makes for interesting reading but probably nothing of any particular surprise.  We have known for decades about the Club Card and similar initiatives amassing tons of data to try to predict shopping habits on an individual basis for stock management purposes as well as for driving a program of incentives and advertising to present customised offers of the right products at the right time to the right people in order to drive revenue.  And whilst AI didn’t predict the run on loo roll experienced at the start of the Covid lock down, one would expect that it would have learned something from the experience.

Another interesting article on the subject of AI was published in Lexology a couple of weeks ago about AI in facilities management scenarios (https://bit.ly/3lgzDUV).  This was interesting because it is highly relevant to several of the Outsourced DPO’s social land lord clients who are keen to deploy AI into their portfolio of properties which in combination with IoT promises to takes things to another level.

The Vendee Globe (https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news) got off on time yesterday but Fabrice Amedeo had to head back to the start to fix a problem.  It was probably too early in the race for the AI referenced in last week’s blog to be operational – but it would be interesting to see how it read the mood of the French skipper as he realised he had to make a U-turn.