AI Use Case - Automatic Product Categorization
Company ABCD (The name of the company has been changed for privacy purposes) had a large database of products from various manufacturers. It served the interior design industry, so there was a huge amount of product images. There was a project for a visual search tool where users can upload images or drawings of desired products and get a list of similar products from the database.
This was a good case for organic Machine Learning usage. We created a vector representation of each product image and saved it in the database table with the reference to related product. When a user uploads a new image, all we have to do is to create a vector representation of the uploaded image and retrieve products whose images were similar to the uploaded one. Search results were amazing, but then we discovered that we can use the same technique to shorten the painfully long process of manual product categorization.
Whenever there was a new manufacturer that had to be accepted into the database, it took about one month for the data management team to insert products manually in the database. The longest part of the process was categorization of each product. There was a huge cascading list of categories, subcategories, subsubcategories and so on that counted around five thousand items. The data manager had to select a category from the deepest level for each product. Often one product belonged to more than one category. This was a hard and error prone process.
By using machine learning based visual comparison tools we were able to detect the approximate category of each new product instantly. Then, it took significantly less time for data managers to check if there are any errors. This incredibly shortened process of new clients onboarding, created huge opportunities for budget savings and company reputation boost.
This project took place several years ago, today there are much more advanced tools to make this process more efficient, but the importance of this story is to describe how one organic solution led to the other with even bigger impacts. Innovation that comes with AI technology gives us great opportunities if we learn to look into the right directions within our businesses.