A concept image of the AI Sales Agent [Shinsegae Department Store]
A concept image of the AI Sales Agent [Shinsegae Department Store]

Shinsegae Department Store announced Thursday that an AI-based hyper-personalized customer analysis technology it jointly developed with Seoul National University has been accepted as a paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), the world's most prestigious AI academic conference.

ICML is a global academic forum where researchers from major tech companies and leading universities present the latest advances in AI. The acceptance marks the first time an industry-academia research collaboration from South Korea's department store sector has been recognized by the conference. The project grew out of a memorandum of understanding Shinsegae signed with SNU's Graduate School of Data Science in January last year.

Working together, Shinsegae and Seoul National University developed what they call "AI Ready Data" — a framework that structures about 200 million shopping records accumulated across online and offline channels so that AI systems can understand and learn from them. The framework enables AI to independently interpret and analyze a wide range of shopping data, including customers' purchase histories, visit patterns and brands of interest, giving the retailer a more precise foundation for profiling individual customers' buying tendencies and lifestyles.

Shinsegae plans to roll out an "AI Sales Agent" based on this technology in early next year. The tool is designed to analyze sales floor data in real time and support staff with customer profiling, purchase pattern tracking, product management and promotional strategy. Preliminary simulations Shinsegae conducted using the research findings showed that applying AI-based personalized recommendation technology could raise the average transaction value by up to 46 percent.

"Shinsegae Department Store will continue to advance customer experience and retail innovation through AI technology, strengthen our data-driven decision-making framework, and help shape a new retail paradigm," said Lee Sung-hwan, executive director of sales strategy at Shinsegae Department Store.


siuu@heraldcorp.com