How DaveAI is Personalising Shopping Experience in Offline Retail Spaces without invading Customer Privacy.

Is it a myth that Personalisation always comes at the cost of privacy? With the increasing adoption of AI by enterprises to provide better services to their customers & thereby gain a competitive advantage, the discussions around respecting privacy of the end customer’s data, is still not at the fulcrum of this discussion. All brands have policies to regarding ,invading Customer Privacy.

DaveAI, named by Nasscom among the ten most promising startups to watch out in 2019 helps retailers enable a personalised & engaging product discovery experience for customers in physical retail spaces. The startup leverages a proprietary parent pending AI platform built in-house, that enables personalisation at scale. A refreshing change in approach though is how we, although being a B2B product, keeps the end customers data privacy as its main priority.
Power of Anonymised & Pseudonymized data:
Dave tries to identify what the person is likely to do, rather than who he/she is. Demographic and lifestyle attributes like gender, age, clothing, engagement with a specific media, and other visual attributes is where DaveAI focuses on. More importantly, DaveAI processes all data, including images streams of retail store customers in a completely anonymous way making it virtually impossible to identify the customer or gather any personal data about the customers. Since the platform is focused on what the customer does, relevant interactions such as likes, dislikes, engagements etc. are collected which makes it possible for DaveAI to make a prediction in hyper real-time about what the customer may be interested in.
Dr. Ananthakrishnan, Co-founder and CTO, says that DaveAI is a platform designed to create an affinity graph with behavioural data points to predict a customer’s persona during for that specific store visit. Having worked on various AI projects including the Samsung Bixby, Dr. Ananthakrishnan was able to envisage a design for DaveAI that eliminates inefficiencies like batch data training and the need for data scientists to fine tune algorithms which is a requirement in most AI platforms. This means, the chances that a human will be able to access the personal data of a customer is reduced to zero.

It is easy to be carried away with what enterprises want, says Sriram, Co-founder & CEO, DaveAI. There were lot of enterprises who wanted to use facial recognition to recognise their visitors. While our platform was capable of doing it, we wanted to adhere to our core philosophy of respecting an end customer’s privacy. We always advice enterprises on the right approach and the relevance of having explicit customer consent with full disclosure if such initiatives are undertaken.

DaveAI is benchmarking against GDPR norms set out by the EU on data privacy although their predominant business today is in India. You can visit www.iamdave.ai to know more about their work. With the new personal data protection bill tabled, many such enterprises especially startups would be forced to catch up and align with the country’s new norm. We will try and provide you a snippet on the draft of the new data protection bill in our next article.