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Transcending Boundaries: AI’s Big Impact on Digital Commerce

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In today's rapidly evolving digital commerce landscape, PROS looks to industry analysts like Heather Hershey, Research Director at IDC, as a leading light. At PROS Outperform, Heather recently presented trends about the future of digital commerce. We’d like to recap some of the trends that she highlighted at PROS Outperform, along with key takeaways from the event, and further insight from Heather’s report Transcendent Commerce: Leveraging GenAI to Harness Human Centricity for Durable Growth.

Using AI to drive operational efficiencies

In her presentation, Heather outlined three key challenges facing businesses: cost reduction, increased profitability, and sustaining growth. As a matter of fact, findings from the IDC MarketScape for Digital Commerce 2023-2024, showed that nearly twice as many stakeholders are concerned with growth over sustainable profit. IDC’s August 2023 GenAI ARC Survey found that among C-suite executives:

  • 44% are looking to enhance customer experience and service
  • 35.1% aim for enhanced revenue generation
  • 36.2% seek improved decision-making time
  • 28.8% look to GenAI as a source of competitive differentiation

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to drive operational efficiency and sustained growth as our backdrop, at our 2024 Outperform event we announced the latest version of Gen IV AI. The latest features of PROS Gen IV AI include:

  • Improved prediction of customer willingness-to-pay using deep learning
  • Unified data from a wide variety of types and sources
  • Real-time pricing adjustments
  • Explanations of the AI’s pricing decisions
  • Leveraging all available data for dynamically predicting prices, a deviation from traditional segmentation
  • Automatic seasonality and trend modeling

AI is revolutionizing the commerce ecosystem

Integrating AI seamlessly into our solutions allows businesses to harness predictive analytics, offering tailored customer experiences and real-time pricing optimization. Businesses leveraging PROS technology report significant improvements in revenue generation and customer satisfaction rates while transcending traditional siloes, merging B2B and B2C operations into a singular, cohesive strategy.

Heather explains that “transcendent commerce is a strategic response to today's fragmented digital landscape, offering a unified, customer-first model that is adaptable, efficient, and deeply engaging by harnessing the power of generative AI in a human-centric framework.” And further noted that conversations with customers, presenters, and the PROS team at Outperform solidified her ongoing observation about the convergence of B2B/B2C.

We believe this echoes many of the achievements highlighted at Outperform, underscoring the pivotal role of generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning (ML) in revolutionizing the commerce ecosystem and the push to centralize all commerce activities.

Clear data strategy is critical in the age of AI

As an AI-native company, it was natural for us to build our platform around deploying AI solutions effectively and flexibly to support the best of breed at all times. Earlier in the year we ran an internal survey that revealed more than 95% of our colleagues were very excited about opportunities with AI and more than 56% of them were already using AI solutions in their day-to-day. As a result, we were driven to leverage AI in the best possible way and one of the primary objectives for that was the creation of the PROS AI Council, which brings in people from across the company to hold our AI efforts accountable. In the age of AI, it's imperative that we have a clear data strategy and we pride ourselves on taking a transparent approach to our AI applications and decisions.

PROS is leading the way with intelligent commerce

As businesses continue to seek innovative ways to remain competitive, PROS stands out as a beacon of transformative AI-powered solutions. PROS intelligent commerce, powered by real-time data and advanced algorithms, equips businesses to make swift, evidence-based decisions. As the digital commerce world evolves, PROS exemplifies how businesses can harness GenAI and ML to create a trust-centric environment that drives customer satisfaction and business success.

Watch the replay of Heather’s session or read the full transcript here.

Learn how we created the AI-enabled organization at Outperform 2024.