Artificial intelligence for retail industry in Egypt: Challenges and opportunities

In the era of digital transformation, a mass disruption in the global industries have been detected. Big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are just examples of technologies that are holding such digital disruptive power. On the other hand, retailing is a high-intensity competition and disruptive industry driving the global economy and the second largest globally in employment after the agriculture. AI has large potential to contribute to global economic activity and the biggest sector gains would be in retail. AI is the engine that is poised to drive the future of retail to all-new destinations. The purpose of this research paper is to identify the real opportunities and threats for AI in the Egyptian retail business. Drawing on a detailed analysis to assess the AI opportunity for Egypt in terms of technology, people, culture and ethics and impact using Microsoft five dimensions model conducted in 2018 in UK. Automation of labor was found to play the greatest role to improve the productivity rate in Egypt and the early digitization is the key AI enabler in the country. The research paper highlighted the importance of leveraging data science and build a data asset to both upgrade the customers' experiences and drive digital transformation in retail industry. In brief, this research paper attempts to answer the question “What are the real opportunities and threats for AI in the retail business?” Drawing on a detailed analysis of the business impacts of AI in the Egyptian market and the way to take advantage of them. Further studied are needed to establish the framework that consists of a baseline set of retail business processes integrated with the sales predictive machine learning models. So, the AI model will be embedded in the business process and maintained over time to achieve the full benefit of it. © 2020 Towards the Digital World and Industry X.0 - Proceedings of the 29th International Conference of the International Association for Management of Technology, IAMOT 2020. All rights reserved.