Augmented Reality has massive potential in the retail space. It allows retailers to use innovative techniques to engage their customers. They can create virtual stores in literally any public place and use Predictive/ targeted marketing to auto populate the items which the customer is more likely to buy in that context. Augmented Reality can help in trying out clothes virtually or can help you put on makeup. They can use it to combine AR gaming with shopping to make shopping a more enjoyable and addictive experience.
Predictive Analytics/ Machine learning is being heavily used in Retail to target the right customer with the right set of product, which they would most likely be interested in buying. These Analytical engines pull a lot of data from multiple sources to make intelligent patterns. The data can be from your earlier purchase, credit card data, you social footprint, your searches etc. Few even look and parse you social network photos to identify objects, which you typically use, so that they can target you with similar alternate products.
Retailers are trying to give a highly personalized shopping experience to their customers. This includes personalized welcome messages, intelligent product recommendations, special loyalty program, promotions and targeted real time deals. Most prominent technology the use is iBeacon technology. Beacons are being used in multiple innovative ways to enhance the shopping experience using geo-location features and Contextual Marketing. Retailers are capturing the way Customers are shopping, how much time they are spending on each Aisle and which ones are the high-traffic areas.