In the future, retailers will know if you’re about to take a family vacation Florida and will populate your shopping cart with beach reading, travel-sized toiletries, and snorkels.
Sound helpful? Presumptuous? Scary?
Welcome to the world of predictive recommendations. It’s not happening yet, but David Berkowitz writes in Ad Age that “there’s a quiet war brewing among technology companies” such as Google and Amazon to use the massive amounts of data they collect to predict future behavior.
Predictive recommendations would radically change how people search and also how people discover products.
“People will train technology with their behavior, and the technology will train people as the relevance of its recommendations increases,” Berkowitz predicts.
You can read more about predictive recommendations at adage.com.
