Every day, MATCHESFASHION adds hundreds of items to its website. The luxury fashion retailer also has millions of individual customer profiles, updated constantly based on people’s behavior and buying history. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, a branch of AI that applies statistical analyses and algorithms to large volumes of data, helps the luxury fashion retailer determine which ones should be featured in each customers’ email marketing.

“With AI and machine learning, we can match individual customer profiles with new products and within seconds, send emails containing only the relevant products to each person,” explains Nicolas Pickaerts, director of eCommerce at MATCHESFASHION. However, he’s quick to point out that AI alone doesn’t make these decisions. “We will never follow algorithms 100%, and we’ll make sure we have manual intervention as part of the process,” he says.

The real value of AI is to automate tasks and analyze troves of data, freeing human marketers to focus on more strategic and creative thinking. That’s one main takeaway from Beyond the Hype: How Marketers Can Capitalize on AI, a new Sailthru-sponsored whitepaper from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.

Many marketers struggle with AI, having a difficult time understanding how to implement it beyond first-generation chatbots and product recommendations. In the whitepaper, we focus on those brands who are using AI and machine learning to drive real business results, like MATCHESFASHION.

In the past, sales came exclusively from stores in the U.K. Today, eCommerce makes up 95% of the brand’s revenue; 82% of sales also happen outside the U.K. To keep up, MATCHESFASHION uses AI to determine customer lifetime value, a figure the brand finds more illuminating than how much people spend. For example, if a new customer spends $700 on a t-shirt, an algorithm may mark them as a potential VIP down the line.

Download Beyond the Hype: How Marketers Can Capitalize on AI to learn more about how MATCHESFASHION.COM wins with AI and how your brand can, too.