Shopper Analytics vs. Free Will. How much can we predict people’s behavior?

The future is here. The huge amount of shopper data generated every minute(*) in retailers all over the world is allowing Watson-like machines to predict what we are going to buy, where and when, pushing us to buy more, more often. And this is not going to get better. Collected data will include different types of behaviors (not only transactions, but digital interactions, social influence, physical movements in and out store…), and machines will increase their power to a point where by 2030 a $1000 computer will be a thousand times more powerful than a single human brain.  Read the rest of this entry »