Retail and e-commerce
Assortment, stock, customer communication: where AI helps immediately in retail and where personalisation becomes legally delicate.
What works well
| Task | Value |
|---|---|
| Product copy from manufacturer data | very high |
| Filling missing article attributes | high |
| Grouping reviews by topic | high |
| Analysing zero-result searches | high |
| Forecasting stock requirements | medium, with your own history |
| Checking shelves against the planogram | medium, with a fixed camera |
| Personalising prices | legally delicate |
Introduction
- 01
Start with article data
No personal reference, immediately measurable value, checkable against the datasheet.
- 02
Mandatory declarations from the system
Energy labelling, unit price, origin, warnings: carried over, not generated.
- 03
Analyse reviews
Pseudonymised, grouped by topic, reflected back to purchasing and quality.
- 04
Only then recommendations
And then with a settled legal basis and information.
- Check product copy against the mandatory declaration list before publication.
- Strip author data from reviews before analysis.
- Return stock forecasts as ranges, not point values.
Personalisation, classified
| Form | Classification |
|---|---|
| Recommendation from the current basket | routinely unproblematic |
| Recommendation from purchase behaviour over time | Profiling, Art. 6(1)(f) with information |
| Cross-site behavioural advertising | Consent per supervisory guidance |
| Price differences by profile | Consumer protection, equal treatment, high risk |
| Credit check during checkout | Annex III high risk, Art. 22 GDPR |
The last row catches retailers more often than expected: deciding on invoice payment during checkout is a creditworthiness assessment.
Cameras on the shop floor
- Shelf checking is permissible where people are technically obscured before images leave the device.
- A count without re-identification across days is routinely proportionate.
- Biometric recognition of customers is generally impermissible and, in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement, prohibited in principle.
- Staff are captured too. Analysis per workstation engages co-determination.
See Face recognition.
Entry sheet: retail
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Entry sheet for retail
This sector's tasks by risk class, the points to settle beforehand, and the metrics the benefit shows up in.
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