South Korean conglomerate Lotte Group will use IBM Watson in enhancing customers’ shopping experiences and setting up business strategies for the group companies, becoming the first large-sized enterprise in Korea to adopt AI-based analysis to its wide range of businesses.

Lotte Group said on Wednesday that it signed an agreement with IBM Korea to use the U.S tech giant’s Watson solution, a cognitive computing system that is capable of offering answers based on learned information, to its subsidiaries including retail outlets and confectionary units. Under the terms of the agreement, Lotte will be offering new services based on Watson’s customer data analysis skills.

The company will first launch a chatting robot offering shopping advisory services that will be used at its retail units such as department stores and hypermarkets next year. A chatting robot dubbed Charlotte, which is named after a heroine Charlotte from novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and where the group’s nameplate comes from, is a virtual personal assistance that would give advice on shopping. The Charlotte, to be a mobile app, will verbally communicate with customers and offer tailored assistance from product selection to transaction support based on customer data analysis.

In addition, Lotte together with IBM will develop an artificial intelligence-based platform supporting with business decision making. Using Watson technologies, Lotte will analyze various data ranging from external market data to internal sales and product information and use the findings in developing new products and setting up different business strategies for its subsidiaries including its confectionary unit.

The system will study data collected from various sources such as social media, blogs, and customer data, analyze them, and provide a recommendation on new product development, an unnamed Lotte Group official explained.

The group aims to introduce the artificial intelligence-based system at its all business areas within five years by launching a group-wide IT service system based on Watson. Its IT service arm Lotte Data Communications will be responsible for establishing the system while frequent buyers management unit Lotte Members will be in charge of data analysis.

By Sohn Il-seon

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