Small businesses can also benefit from AI

Big businesses are deploying artificial intelligence to streamline their supply chains, cut labour costs, and better understand their customers. For small- and medium-sized enterprises, keeping pace can be a daunting task. “But there are funding grants and subsidies businesses can apply to both provincially and federally for adopting AI,” says Maxime Cohen, Scale AI Chair, Professor of Retail and Operations, Director of Research at the Bensadoun School of Retail Management (BSRM). Small businesses can also benefit by understanding research that’s already underway, such as studies of planograms at BSRM’s Retail Innovation Lab. “We all know that items displayed in the middle shelf at eye level sell the most than those displayed at the top or bottom, and so we are trying to quantify the effect by varying the position of different items on different shelves,” Cohen says.