Applied AI and Automation at Canadian Tire Corporation.

AI is trending right now. Everywhere you look, there’s talk about the rise of AI tools and how they simplify jobs across all industries. Retail is no exception. AI is reshaping how retailers do business, and its application is changing how we engage with our customers, employees, and suppliers.

At Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC), an iconic retailer with approximately 1,700 retail locations across Canada, we are innovators and entrepreneurs at our core. CTC has been on an AI journey for several years. Our AI journey started with a problem that needed to be solved – and that’s how we approach applying AI today. We decided to empower the entire organization by leveraging AI as a versatile tool to achieve our strategic objectives instead of creating a centralized AI practice. By putting humans at the center of our AI strategy, we are furthering the Brand Purpose that We Are Here to Make Life in Canada Better.

We have been investing in AI capabilities that enhance our customers’ shopping experience and improve employee productivity while ensuring that we are protecting and securing their data and managing interactions with AI transparently and responsibly. The strategic and responsible use of Generative (Gen) AI is not an experiment for us. We are at an inflection point where we’re not only using AI and automation to solve our current problems but also reframing and using Gen AI to accelerate change.

Internally, AI empowers a community of engaged employees who can focus on training and skills development and create unique experiences that drive innovation, change, and value creation. Developing and integrating this technology into everything we do requires a new way of working and thinking about solving AI-enabled problems.

 We have been investing in AI capabilities that enhance our customers’ shopping experience and improve employee productivity while ensuring that we are protecting and securing their data and managing interactions with AI transparently and responsibly

Putting people at the center of how we use AI is the most important part of our AI strategy and ongoing cultural transformation. If the AI can do it more quickly, then there is an opportunity for our employees to reallocate their time to a more meaningful task. An example of this is an intelligent agent that we have built to boost employee productivity called Chat CTC. We have over 2,500 corporate employees using Chat CTC regularly for personal and team productivity. While our Marketing team uses it for content generation and iterating on new concepts, our Communications team uses it for summarizing reports, our Tech Developers for programming help in generating codes, and our business analysts for analyzing insights, observations and suggestions for improvements.

Through CTC’s partnership with Microsoft, we have collaborated on a co-development that uses AI to enhance the shopping experience, optimize operations, and unlock new opportunities. We have created a solution to help Canadian Tire automotive customers with an easy-to-use Shopping Assistant, launching in the spring of 2024. Powered by Azure OpenAI Services, Canadian Tire’s Shopping Assistant will help customers select the right vehicle tires while providing real-time inventory information from the customer’s local store. Once the best tire has been selected, the Shopping Assistant will allow customers to purchase the new tires, all while using natural language to converse with the AI.

We know that AI can take something challenging and transition it to something simple and scalable, providing us with a new way of operating. Using the power of AI’s prediction capabilities, we recognize that we are not just going to use this to build point solutions, but we are going to use it to create system solutions that will disrupt how we operate. The evolving language and reasoning that AI offers make this possible.

This is an exciting time for businesses and people to embrace and experiment with this technology. Successful adoption and responsible integration of AI into business strategy is essential to the ongoing success of retailers in a rapidly changing economic environment, and although AI is trending, it is far from a trend. We need to reimagine how we can work and use AI to be a catalyst for change.