AI Impact Awards 2025: New Innovations Seek to Gamify the Shopping Experience

Newsweek

6 hours ago

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In the age of artificial intelligence, it feels like AI knows more about our shopping habits than we do. It knows what we want to buy before we add it to our shopping carts. It knows how many consumers are going to want a product before businesses begin restocking their shelves. It even knows how much we're willing to pay for items before we punch in our credit card information.
Innovations across the industry, however, suggest AI knows much more.
To recognize businesses that are using these capabilities in new ways, Newsweek announced three winners in the Brand & Retail category of its inaugural AI Impact Awards. The recipients of this year's awards are software company Perfect Corp., tech company Trax Retail and beauty incubator Maesa.
"It's super exciting," David Gottlieb, Trax's chief revenue officer, told Newsweek. "We really feel this is a validation of a decades-long strategy that we've had in building this company on the back of AI before it was cool."
Trax took home the award for Best Outcomes, Product Development and Innovation, for its image recognition technology. The company, which operates in more than 90 countries and works with the top 100 consumer goods companies, has trained computers to identify items in shopping aisles to generate real-time data and metrics that could help manufacturers do a better job of selling their products.
"The industry has an incredibly high appetite for better understanding execution," Gottlieb said. "[CPG companies] want to know, What's my share of shelf? Am I at eye level? Do I leave the aisle? How do I stack competitively? What's happening with private label?"
AI Impact Awards: Brand & Retail
AI Impact Awards: Brand & Retail
Newsweek Illustration
According to the company, integration of its technology has resulted in 95 percent accuracy in in-store data capture.
Trax has also become a pioneer in the image recognition space by deploying representatives to visit retailers and execute tasks on behalf of manufacturers as well as by offering consumers a fun and budget-friendly way to engage with its technology.
Shoppers can download Shopkick, an app that gamifies the shopping experience by offering different discounts. Say a shopper watches a video at home about a product, this would earn them a small reward. But if they were to go to the store and actually hold the product and scan the barcode, they'd earn a bigger reward. And if they were to buy the product and scan the receipt, they'd get the maximum reward.
"We're driving shopper engagement, awareness and, ultimately, purchase behavior," Gottlieb said.
In the future, he hopes Trax will dramatically expand its insights with augmented reality (AR), so that instead of taking pictures, users can just walk up to the shelves and look through their phone cameras, capturing real-time insights as they scan the aisles. This new way of interacting with products will help users more quickly identify the goods they're looking for—for instance, picking out only gluten-free beers or beers brewed in Canada—by just panning the shelves instead of individually scanning every item.
"It's going to unlock a volume of information and a scale of collection that hasn't really been possible before and can create a lot of value for all the brands that want to better understand [consumer data], especially in independent stores and places where it's not as easy to get that information," Gottlieb said.
Another company that has been developing AI to gamify the shopping experience is Perfect Corp., the recipient of this year's Best Outcomes, Customer Experience, award.
The company, which focuses on AI and AR in the beauty and fashion industries, won this year's award for its new Real-Time Skin Analysis tool—a technology used by major brands like Sephora. The tool helps identify skin type, tone, sensitivity, texture and conditions to help come up with customized product recommendations.
"The interesting thing is skin analysis is not a new idea. The dermatology industry has existed for many, many years," Wayne Liu, the chief growth officer and president of Americas at Perfect Corp., told Newsweek.
"The true problem here is accessibility," he said. "The machine is pretty expensive—the cheapest one is probably $20,000—and it just sits there, so that makes it challenging for many people to get the assessment. When we talked to these doctors, we realized another problem: Because it's a big machine, you have to go to the site to do the analysis, and that's why some people just give up on treatment."
Liu said Real-Time Skin Analysis has not only solved the accessibility problem but also turned a medical-like assessment into a "fun, gamified, playful" experience that is still profitable.
Take makeup brand Benefit for example. The brand uses Real-Time Skin Analysis to power its Pore Analysis Tool, which, according to Perfect Corp., has been found to boost product sales 14 times over normal among those who use the technology. Customers who engaged with the Pore Analysis Tool reportedly spent twice as long on Benefit's website as well.
Skinsight—another custom tool powered by Real-Time Skin Analysis and used on cruise lines like Royal Caribbean International, Carnival Cruise Line and Virgin Voyages—also prompted a 35 percent increase in AI-recommended product sales, Perfect Corp. reported. And Dr. Eunice Park, a New York–based plastic surgeon and an early adopter of Real-Time Skin Analysis, told Liu that the latest capabilities have led to a 36 percent conversion among her patients.
Liu noted that Park, who had just one office when she started implementing Perfect Corp.'s technology, has now expanded to four locations. Using Park as an example, Liu argued that while AI has upended employment, it also has the potential to create new jobs.
"Dr. Park probably doesn't need that many receptionists now, but in the grand scale, she actually expanded her business," Liu said. "She's actually hiring more people."
"That's the high-level effect of AI. It creates more opportunities. It will probably replace current jobs, but it will create new jobs," he added. "We want to make sure AI is making this world a beautiful place. That's what we've always believed."
Perfect Corp. was not the only company in the beauty space to win an award in the Brand & Retail category. Maesa received the Best Outcomes, Marketing and Creative, award for its content creation around fragrance brand Fine'ry.
For Fine'ry, which launched exclusively at Target in 2023, Maesa decided to experiment with generative AI in response to its viral success on social media.
"This level of engagement required high-quality content produced at scale," Maesa said in its application to Newsweek's AI Impact Awards. "Traditionally, producing creative assets of such quality required significant time and financial investment, often involving large teams of designers, editors and creative."
"The introduction of AI technology enabled Maesa to cut 90 percent of the time spent and significantly reduce production costs for a similar output," the company said. "The ability to generate assets quickly and at scale allowed Maesa to allocate resources more strategically, investing in other areas of growth and innovation."
Leveraging AI, Maesa's creative team helped Fine'ry revolutionize its marketing strategies by leaving creative assets to generative AI, by enhancing its user experience at pop-up exhibits, by launching a visual experience on gaming platform Roblox and by releasing AI-driven video campaigns for the Fine'ry fragrance line.
To see the full list of winners and awards, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.