That’s a clickbaity headline isn’t it.

But it’s a question that actually came up this week in a workshop I was running with a lovely Swedish toy retailer called Lekia.

I presented some very macro consumer and retailer trends, and inevitably touched on “kidulting” and “infantilisation” – in short, kids, teenagers and young adults around the world queuing for toys. Sometimes new, sometimes nostalgic.

And funnily enough, in another recent session for Ralph Lauren I was asked if AI could reliably predict specific products going viral – in other words, not just trends that might fuel virality, but the viral products themselves.

So, can AI predict the future to this extent? Let’s explore!

Depends who you ask

The first point to make on all this – and I can tell you from direct experience over the last couple of weeks – is that the whole thing depends on who you ask.

Tech companies who do predictive analytics, or even those vaguely adjacent to it, will give you a firm yes. And that’s because, frankly, these kinds of companies, currently, will say yes to anything. For the right price they will probably do your double glazing.

And obviously, ask AI itself (or, in my case, Google’s AI overview) and you’ll be greeted with a similar, jockish confidence. Of course I can do that – I can do anything!

But the overview itself hints at the nuances of this challenge. 

Yes, through real-time social listening, visual analysis and Natural Language Processing, it can aggregate all kinds of complex data and find the patterns.

We know all of this already. It is, for example, the invisible power behind TikTok’s incredible growth and success – helping to shape each of our feeds into something that leads to brand and product engagement.

However, towards the end of the overview, like a politician answering questions from disgruntled voters at the end of presenting a manifesto, it briefly makes a small admission: AI struggles to predict random events because it may not understand cultural, political or emotional contexts.

So, is virality in retail innately unpredictable? And does that make the pursuit of preparing for it pointless?

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