How Martec is Treating AI as a Subject in Its Product Portfolio
Martec builds e-learning and related products to teach retail skills to retailers, consumer goods manufacturers that supply them, and to technology, accounting and other third-party companies that sell products or services to them. Our core focus is teaching best practice retail business process skills.
AI is impacting all industries and retail is no exception. This article describes how we contribute to the AI momentum. Our skills training covers everyone in operational positions at levels from the shop floor the Board of Directors. The contribution we make is two-fold:
- In the knowledge we provide
- Guidance on what needs to be sourced from other suppliers.
Our start point is our job role specific learning paths. A learning path is a collection of training interventions designed to equip someone in the job role it relates to, with all the necessary business skills to be successful and fully competent. Martec’s learning paths include the skills and subjects that Martec trains in and includes a section for clients to include soft skills training, such as spreadsheet mastery or leadership relevant to the job role. We make suggestions to help clients complete these sections in less time.
At the lower levels, our learning paths include three recommendations:
- A company policy document that spells out the company rules of behaviour with respect to AI security and guardrails. This includes things like not sharing company intellectual property with large language model (LLM) providers like ChatGPT, Claude and so on. If you have such a document, that’s fine If not, we can provide you with a draft that you can customize.
- Anyone who can access LLMs, to do research, improve written documents, produce product descriptions or similar for web stores etc., could potentially benefit from a class on how to write prompts for these systems, known as prompt engineering, to get the best results. We can point you to some providers of this training if necessary.
- At appropriate levels, internal subject matter experts, mostly from IT, will need to understand how the AI development and implementation process works and what their role might be in any AI project. For example, they may need to detect hallucinations in the model results and be involved in correcting them. Hallucinations often occur because of gaps in the original training data. Hence the solution might be to resource additional training data for the AI model, and this will probably need subject matter expert support to create or find the data and then evaluate the fix. A training class to acquaint people with an overview of the AI development process pointing out specific roles for the line of business experts would be valuable.
Most retail companies buy application software from third parties rather than write their own large application suites, though there are exceptions. Martec tracks how these technology vendors progress with the adoption of AI as part of their solutions. Examples would be forecasting systems using machine learning, store systems using computer vision for product and facial recognition, and LLMs for store associate access to product knowledge in real time.
As we write new classes and upgrade the content in existing classes, we include relevant content on where AI is being or can be used now to improve a variety of business processes. For example, there is a lot of buzz about AI agents, but a modest level of real-world development. Our classes are progressively being updated with guidance to line of business staff on where AI might be beneficial. Our aim is to support those people with knowledge so that when they have to work with internal IT people, external consultants, or software product companies with AI capability, they can play an effective role in working with the solution builders to create working AI implementations. The history to date has not been spectacular.
In the next few years AI will bring significant real benefits The start though has not been good. However, as the industry shakes down, the real benefits will become clearer. There are lots of promising areas where benefits can be delivered successfully and the software companies that retailers use today for buying, merchandising, store operations, e-commerce and supply chain management solutions will be a key element of that success.
Martec is paying attention to how the software vendors are progressing and making sure that our classes help create awareness of the possibilities for our learners, without all the inaccurate hype currently associated with this area.
Outside of the IT Department, the investment retailers need to make in AI training is not large and need not take a large share of your budgets. The IT Department will need more but not excessively so if you leverage the investments your external IT suppliers are making.
L&D Departments will need to understand more about ROI analysis so that they can track how projects are progressing and recognise when interventions are necessary.
Please contact us if you have questions. We are happy to be helpful.