Brands Turn to AI-Powered Retail Intelligence for Growth
It's certainly not new that CPG companies lean on retail intelligence to enable growth. Brands have long relied on shipment and POS data to understand in-store dynamics. What was missing was what was going on inside the store.
Knowing the importance of retail execution, brands previously used smartphone technology — and now are turning to artificial intelligence for better data collection and analysis.
There's a new class of AI-enabled retail intelligence that can provide real-time insights at scale to address execution challenges from pricing compliance, to on shelf availability, to display execution and new product launches.
"We're seeing opportunities to lift the black box of retail. We talk about it being the third revolution of retail data," said Storesight's Marc Yount, president and COO, during a P2PI LIVE session this month in Schaumburg, Illinois.
Formed by the merger of Field Agent and Shelfgram earlier this year, Storesight provides retail intelligence solutions to CPG brands. The company's solutions are designed to help brands see their product and category at the shelf, in real time, in hundreds of stores via AI-enabled technology.
Those brands increasingly are seeing retail execution as the new battleground for growth and efficiency, according to Storesight.
Yount emphasized the need for technology to help address such common challenges as slow category growth, inefficient trade spend, and inconsistent and expensive in-store labor. The focus has shifted to the critical nature of shelf execution and the challenges of ensuring product availability and display.
Data-driven AI enablement has been "the unlock" to retail visibility, according to Storesight. It enables real-time shelf monitoring while machine learning models anticipate demand shifts.
"The AI layer is the new part," Yount said. "There's been some false starts. There's been some things started in this space to try to bring scale data from what's actually going on at the store, but I think the missing piece was not necessarily the collection or the ability to get data back to home office, but to actually be able to parse off of the photos, be able to aggregate, to create new metrics.
"AI has unlocked all of that, and frankly, the open-source modeling with AI now allows us to change that regularly and keep up with it. ... It's really, I think, the right time, right place.
"I think you could have gotten some information from the store, and many of you do have data feeds from the store. But what AI can do with that information, what it can extract off of photos and videos, is changing rapidly, so that it can be at scale and more prevalent."
According to co-presenter Henry Ho, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Storesight, the future of retail intelligence with AI is bright. From optimized planogram compliance to real-time shelf monitoring and demand insights and forecasting, automated AI tools ensure products are correctly placed — with proper stock levels for enhanced availability.
AI brings the speed, scale and easy-of-use tools that CPG teams need to win at retail, Ho said.
This was originally published on P2PI, a CGT sister publication.