Retail companies around the world are using facial recognition, a type of computer vision technology, to enhance customer satisfaction, improve staff management, and gain insights related to customer preference. Moreover, the integration of image recognition technology allows brick-and-mortar retail stores to monitor stock, analyze in-store traffic, map customer behavior as they walk around, and determine customer loyalty. Thus, the increasing focus of retailers on optimizing their resources will result in the largescale adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled solutions in the coming years.  

Besides, the expanding e-retail industry will help the AI in retail market exhibit an exceptional CAGR of 35.4% during the forecast period (2019–2024). According to P&S Intelligence, the market was valued at $720.0 million in 2018, and it will generate $4,337.1 million revenue by 2024. The progress of the e-retail sector can be credited to the rising internet penetration, growing smartphone usage, mounting investments being made in the logistics industry, and surging use of alternate payment methods. 

In the last few years, retailers preferred recommendation engines over other AI-driven solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), fraud detection, merchandise management, price optimization, supply chain management (SCM), and visual search solutions and chatbots. The surging adoption of recommendation engines by retailers is credited to the growing popularity of digital marketing in the North American and Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions. Online retail companies, such as Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc., use this AI solution to suggest products to customers based on their past purchases. 

Presently, the AI in retail market is fragmented, with the presence of numerous players, such as IBM Corporation, Infosys Limited, Numenta Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Intel Corporation, Evolv Technologies Inc., Google LLC, Amazon Web Services Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., ViSenze Pte. Ltd., Oracle Corporation, Accenture PLC, and SAP SE. Currently, the competition in the market is intensifying due to the surging number of global and regional players providing AI-enabled services and solutions. Nowadays, key players are focusing on mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, and product launches to gain a competitive edge in the industry. 

Globally, the North American region emerged as the dominant user of AI-driven solutions for the retail sector, due to the surging use of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies by brick-and-mortar and online retail stores. Retail chains such as Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. use these technologies to understand customer behavior and improve the overall shopping experience. Additionally, the rising penetration of smartphones and the escalating need for high internet speed will also result in the largescale adoption of AI-enabled solutions in the retail industry. 

Whereas, the APAC AI in retail market is expected to demonstrate the fastest growth throughout the forecast period, globally. This can be ascribed to the increasing use of ML technology by online retail companies in the region, especially in China. Currently, the region is witnessing a largescale adoption of AI-enabled recommendation engines, SCM solutions, and price optimization solutions to improve the shopping experience of customers, owing to the soaring sales and growing penetration of e-commerce firms, such as JD.com Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Limited, and Amazon.com Inc.

Thus, the soaring popularity of image recognition technologies and the booming e-retail sector will accelerate the penetration of AI solutions and services in online and offline retail stores in the foreseeable future.