Retail Insight Launches AI Analytics Platform for Grocery Retailers

Retail Insight launched DecisionInsight, a new part of its AI-powered retail operations platform that lets retail teams ask a question of their operational data in plain language and get to the cause and the fix in minutes.

DecisionInsight is an on-demand AI analytics platform for retail: one place where anyone in a retailer can find insight rooted in the facts of their own operation.

"Retailers have no shortage of data. The difficulty has always been getting to answers quickly enough to act on them," says Alex Considine Tong, chief product officer at Retail Insight. "AI can analyze vast volumes of information at extraordinary speed, but without context and a deep understanding of that data, it can just as easily lead you to the wrong conclusion. Very few companies can bring the context and the technology to the same problem, and twenty years in retail technology and data is what lets us do it."

Key takeaways:

·        Users ask questions in everyday language and receive a written answer, with the numbers visualized in charts.

·        DecisionInsight brings together the retailer's own operational data and the ontology that gives it meaning, the datasets and domain expertise Retail Insight has built over two decades in retail, and the most capable AI models available today. In practice, that means bringing together core operational retail data, spanning sales, deliveries, promotions, on-shelf availability, inventory, waste and markdowns, labor, forecasting, weather and supplier performance, and letting anyone question all of it without needing to know where any of it lives or how to build the analysis.

·        DecisionInsight’s context comes from a semantic model that understands the retailer's own business. Users can follow the reasoning as the platform goes, see what is established fact and what has been inferred, and trace any figure back to the analysis that produced it.

·        Answers also arrive framed for whoever is asking, with purpose-built agents for category owners, senior leadership, supply chain, store operations leads and store managers, none of which leave the user to work out for themselves what to do about it.