Using AI to Compare Retail Product Performance

AI this, AI that. It seems like everyone is trying to shoehorn AI into everything even if it doesn’t make sense. Most of the use cases I come across online are either not a fit for AI or could be easily done without it, eliminating the uncertainty of the responses. However, below I explore a use case that is not only a good fit, but also very much accelerated by the use of AI.

The Use Case

In the retail world, sometimes you have products that don’t seem to sell well even though they might be very similar to another product that does. Being able to group these products and analyze them as a cohort is the first useful step in understanding why.

The Data and Toolset

For this particular exercise I will be using a retail sales dataset from Zara that I got from Kaggle. It contains ...