AI in Retail: What’s Working and What’s Not?

[sacredheart926]

Retail business owners: What has been your experience using AI to help run your business? From product descriptions and marketing to inventory planning and customer service, where has it saved you time—and where has it created more work or missed the mark? I’d love to hear both the good and the bad!

[direct007]

Starting in July of 2026, we rolled out multiple AI implementations.

1. We have an AI receptionist answering our telephone. This has been a game changer. We get multiple calls every day... many simultaneously, ranging from intelligent people asking intelligent questions to people asking questions that you wonder how they found the door to get out of their house in the morning, let alone find our website.   We trained the AI to answer just about any question accurately and kindly that is thrown at it, and if it doesn't have the answer, it knows to forward the call to either our text agent or our live support.   Occasionally, there will be someone who doesn't like speaking to an AI agent and will immediately ask for a live person. Our AI will have no issue transferring the call, but this has reduced the number of calls that we handle with live support from 100% to approximately 20%.   Many people are used to using AI agents that never give the right answer or only give generic answers and not specific answers that applies to their situation so they immediately want to speak to a human because they think they are wasting their time with AI, but AI has come a long way and if trained correctly, can solve their issue or answer their question much quicker than a customer only relying on live agents. The AI agent can also text links to our website directly to the customer's smartphone while it is speaking to the customer. 
2. We added an AI chat agent on our website. It uses the same background information as the voice phone calls.  This has been another game changer, as many people prefer to chat rather than make a voice call. 
3. We added a sister website that allows people to chat with an AI agent who will answer questions, make suggestions, put an order together, and place it in the shopping cart for the customer to check out by entering their shipping information and payment information.  This is basically a test to see how well it works and if people enjoy the shopping experience. We didn't want to replace our existing website entirely until we gather information on how well it's working. This is basically a test to see how well it works and if people enjoy the shopping experience. We didn't want to replace our existing website entirely until we gather information on how well it's working. So far, so good.  Once we tweak any issues that arise, we will most likely implement it into our main website. 
4. We offer a service that requires recurring billing and developed an AI-based billing program that takes contact and order information from our website and enters it in our billing system, and then sends the billing information for recurring invoices over to Square, all with the press of a button. This has saved us hours of manually typing information into our previous billing system and then manually typing it into Square invoicing.

[sacredheart926]

@direct007 What AI Agent are you using?? We have an AI Agent answer our calls when we can't but curious as to what you are using!

[direct007]

We use HeyRosie.  If you decide to give it a try, they offer a 7-day free trial.  

Here is a link that you can use:  heyrosie.com/?ref=jack and if you use this link and the following discount code, you will get a substantial discount:  AFFILIATE50  

[sacredheart926]

Thank you for that I am going to take a look at it! We currently use beside!

[DinaLRosenberg]

We are very careful with the use of AI because our customer base absolutely HATES it and will (and have in past) lead a cancellation campaign. 

We use Ai for product descriptions and email newsletter copy - it's pretty good at getting our voice.

[sacredheart926]

We use Beside to answer our phones when we can’t pick up. If the caller is using a cell phone, it also sends a text asking how we can help. Some customers really dislike AI, but most appreciate getting quick answers to simple questions without having to wait for a callback!

[TCSlaguna]

We have played around with AI product descriptions, social media post ideas and email newsletters as well.

I have TRIED and TRIED and TRIED to create a Service Provider payout report using Square APIs, but the Appointments API and Transactions API cannot link customers in appointments with their actual payments. 
Spent months in the Square Developer forums, but they are not interested in making it happen. 

[rtfulk]

I’ve been building my wife’s social media app and website.  It is a database of all the casinos in the US, Canada, Caribbean and Cruise Ships.  I have recently added an AI chat bot that allows you to ask  questions about any casino or casinos, for instance which one has bingo, how many slot machines parking info… etc.  and it reports back to you.  It’s amazing how fast it can pull up info from our database.  

[ascoach]

I have been using AI for social media and website feedback.  We do custom work, so we get a lot of hand drawn ideas that I've been loading into AI to get the artwork started for us.  Has saved me a ton of time from starting artwork from scratch.  Also, if a customer's idea does not meet our standard requirements, I upload their artwork to AI, and it will make adjustments that work better for us and meets the approval of the customer.