On December 10, 2021, as part of the College of Management’s Office of International Exchange ACT Global Business Management Program course, “The Asian Business Context,” guest lecturer I-Ming “Jim” Sun shared with students the application and future trends of artificial intelligence (AI) in the new retail industry. Mr. Sun is a graduate of NTU’s engineering department, Harvard Business School, and Stanford University School of Engineering and has rich practical experience in the industry.

At the beginning of the seminar, Mr. Sun used the game Kahoot to give students an initial understanding of the application of AI technology in the retail industry in a fun and interactive way. He used “the three Is” – innovation, integration, and intelligence – to summarize the current trends in the retail industry. With this as a guide, he led students to further explore the practical applications and development of AI technology. During the presentation, Mr. Sun shared many real-life examples of how well-known companies are using AI technology, such as Uniqlo’s “StyleHint” app and Amazon’s unmanned stores. Guiding students to see both the customer and enterprise perspectives at the same time, he led a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of AI technology and how to use it. The atmosphere of the discussion was lively and many students were willing to share their experience of using AI technology services.

In addition, Mr. Sun also pointed out that AI smart voice service will become one of the most important human-machine interfaces, especially in the retail industry. He used the examples of Google’s voice assistant and Tmall’s voice customer service to illustrate the rapid development of AI voice service in today’s retail industry, and asked the students to listen to several audio recordings to see if they could identify the voice in the conversation as coming from an AI assistant. In this way, students could gain a deeper understanding of natural language processing technology in AI technology.

Although the pandemic prevented the lecture from taking place in person, the online conferencing technology still allowed the guest lecturer and students to enthusiastically communicate with each other. In this lecture, Mr. Sun provided many opportunities for brainstorming with the students, and also gave clear answers when students were unfamiliar with or lacked understanding of AI technology. They were able to gain a deeper understanding of the application of AI technology and a more diversified thinking of trends of its future development.

(Written by I-Ting Yen, IBMBA student/Edited by College of Management)