Arvid Stenback, Co-Founder & SVP Sales and Andreas Willgert, Co-Founder & CEO Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly at the forefront of the retail industry today, where it is employed to glean the consumer insights and help retailers streamline their operations, products, to serve their customers better. The technology has made a massive impact since its adoption into the industry, helping retailers and entrepreneurs reduce their annual costs, enhance efficiency of their operations, and offer customers better shopping experiences.
Set against this ever-changing backdrop, if there is one organisation that truly warrants credit for the advancement of AI in retail, it is Formulate. Unlike other players in the market who offer expensive software and external consultants, Team Formulate brings in world-class analytics for retail promotions. In doing so, the company employs AI to analyse client’s transaction data, providing them with insights for better promotions.
Founded by AdreasWillgert and ArvidStenback in 2016, Formulate has successfully developed an automated analytics engine that aims to resolve complex retail marketing issues by processing large volumes of data. Willgert, the CEO of Formulate, believes that the applications of AI have to be diversified beyond just facial recognition and virtual assistant to overcome retail challenges. This reflects in Formulate’s solution, which harnesses AI for existing points of sales data to drive promotions and profits alike.
Equipped with a team of professionals ranging from entrepreneurs, data scientists, and engineers, the company uses the latest market research and machine learning algorithms to provide accurate data to target the untapped customer base, and further the grip of retail.
While promotions drive 20-30 percent of a retailer's turnover, they can highly difficult to understand and manage owing to brand cannibalisation, halo effects between segments, stockpiling, seasonal influences, trends and fluctuating prices. As a result, Willgert recommends leveraging a solution that not only can evaluate impact of past activities but also transform those insights to predict outcomes and new opportunities to drive change. This is precisely where Formulate’s cloud-based solution Retail DecisionCloud is moving the needle.
Banking on decades of retail research, Retail DecisionCloud leverages clients’ POS data to enable them to stimulate and rank the impact of future campaigns. The cloud-based solution Retail DecisionCloud identifies and analyses the past, present, and future promotions of online stores; helping them apply these insights to their future campaigns.
Illustrating more on the benefits of Retail DecisionCloud, Willgert cites a customer success story wherein Coop, Sweden’s second-biggest grocery retailer approached Formulate for making its operations more effective. Coopimplemented Retail DecisionCloud in its everyday operations and the decision-making tool was responsible for finding a fresh edge in competitive offerings that spearhead traffic and diversify the customer pool, to augment the retail giant’s profits.
The induction of Retail DecisionCloud proved to be extremely beneficial, owing to its timely projections of sales and revenue impact after every promotional stint. In addition to being precise or accurate, automation ensured error-free data. The Commercial Director of Coop, admitted to Formulate’s tool helping them verify their business instincts. He added that Retail DesicionCloud gave a clear picture of the impact promotional campaigns had on the revenue and profits of Coop, notifying them of what was working in their favor and what was not.
As retailers, big and small, do not always have the capital or infrastructure to support AI in their everyday work campaigns, Formulate offers Retail DecisionCloud on a subscription basis as well. Built on decade’s worth of retailer data and customer preferences, the machine-learning tool presents a “fast and low touch process.”
Moving forward, a bright future awaits Formulate, which is rapidly exploring new avenues to improve the existing retail processes with the aid of the latest technologies.
