Emart vs Lotte Mart: Retail AI Race Moves Beyond Chatbots
Creatrip Team
21 days ago
South Korea’s two largest supermarket chains, Emart and Lotte Mart, are expanding AI from customer chatbots and product recommendations into full retail operations—sourcing, pricing, inventory, and logistics. Emart uses AI chatbots across its stores (handling over 50% of inquiries), AI cameras at self-checkouts, and an “AI fresh markdown” system for optimal discounts in many seafood and deli outlets; it plans to partner with U.S. startup Reflection AI to link sourcing, ordering, pricing, logistics, inventory, and customer data into one AI-driven operations platform. Lotte Mart focuses on product quality and customer experience with deep-learning quality inspection for fruits (melon, watermelon, Korean melon (chamoe), peach) and an “AI sommelier” at BottleBunker to recommend wines from ~8,000 SKUs. Lotte will open a customer fulfillment center (CFC) in Busan using Ocado automation, AI demand forecasting, and robots to double online handling capacity and process over 30,000 daily deliveries. Analysts say the competition now centers on how organically AI ties sourcing, pricing, inventory, and logistics to real profit and efficiency.
