DALLAS, Oct. 24, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Symphony RetailAI, the leading global provider of AI-enabled revenue growth management solutions and customer-centric insights for retailers and CPG manufacturers, today announced that AI in retail has gained significant momentum, as exhibited at the company’s recent Xcelerate Retail Forums in Dallas and Paris.
More than 400 delegates from leading retailers and CPG manufacturers, representing 27 countries from around the globe, attended the two annual forums in September and October. Throughout the events, attendees experienced how retailers are leveraging AI-enabled solutions to improve the speed and accuracy of customer insights, personalized marketing, supply chain processes and category management. Above all, customers emphasized the critical role AI plays in driving growth and profit.
AI deployments drive results for Symphony RetailAI’s retail and CPG customers
During the opening keynote, Dr. Pallab Chatterjee, chairman and CEO, Symphony RetailAI, highlighted how AI deployments have driven strong results for the company’s retail and CPG customers across marketing, promotions, category management and demand forecasting. Moreover, Symphony RetailAI’s customers are proving that they’re clear “Retail Winners,” by RSR’s standards, because they think opportunistically when it comes to using AI to do the following1:
- Improve their ability to adjust to deviations from sales forecasts
- Optimize prices and markdowns to boost sell-through
- More effectively incorporate customer segmentation and preferences into planning process
- Have a consistent, accurate and detailed demand forecasting platform
- Tailor assortments to customer preferences
- Integrate planning with cross-functional teams
- Shift to a holistic pricing, assortment and promotion decision-making process
“Symphony RetailAI is clearly all-in on making these objectives achievable for its customers,” said Brian Kilcourse, Co-Founder and Partner, RSR. “There’s a lot going on when it comes to AI enablement. But there are few companies that are so AI-forward that they have put ‘AI’ into their company name like Symphony RetailAI has done.”
CINDE, Symphony RetailAI’s personal decision coach, along with the company’s AI-enabled merchandising and supply chain solutions, are driving the results demonstrated at Xcelerate.
Agile merchandising allows retailers to implement the “Rule of 17”
Symphony RetailAI’s research reveals that 17% of items in a given category are duplicative in nature. With this in mind, it’s clear that retailers must come to terms with the “Rule of 17,” determining that category duplication is an issue to prioritize and resolve. By applying this rule to their assortments, retailers can address inventory duplication that limits revenue growth, profitability and efficiency, and also hinders their competitiveness.
The Rule of 17 is best realized through agile merchandising. Agile merchandising allows retailers to identify, design and test merchandising processes in an AI-enabled environment, empowering perpetual opportunity-based assortment changes instead of calendar-based category resets. It also has proven to significantly reduce the time and expenses traditionally associated with these processes, while increasing the accuracy and customer value.
CINDE helps retailers find hidden growth opportunities
CINDE is the first-of-its-kind conversational, AI-enabled personal decision coach designed specifically for the retail industry. As AI becomes increasingly prevalent and critical for business success, CINDE goes beyond extracting insights from data. CINDE delivers and helps decision-makers adopt prescriptive recommendations through natural language-enabled push intelligence and context-sensitive visualizations. Just 20 minutes with CINDE helps retailers find 80% of hidden revenue growth opportunities. For retailers who have adopted CINDE, the platform has been a game changer to identify and act upon opportunities and realize measurable results for their business.
One major retailer is realizing up to a four-fold increase in sales from promotions by leveraging Symphony RetailAI’s forecast optimization capabilities through CINDE.
AI-driven supply chain solutions improve forecast accuracy and reduce waste
The lines between retailers, brands and distributors are blurring and new paths to the consumer are further complicating forecasting and replenishment. Symphony RetailAI software improves demand planning and forecasting accuracy and removes manual guesswork by relying on machine learning and contextual data models. Its AI-enabled supply chain solutions allow retailers to optimize product availability by decreasing out of stocks, inventory and spoilage, as well as gain a better understanding of sales patterns and anomalies at a more detailed level.
Through the use of Symphony RetailAI’s AI-enabled demand forecasting solution, retailers are seeing:
- 3x improvement in forecast accuracy
- 45% reduction in waste
- 10x reduction in manual intervention
AI focus builds as retail heads into 2020
“At our Xcelerate Retail Forum in 2017, I laid out a vision for the grocery story of the future, ‘Supermarket 2020,’” said Dr. Pallab Chatterjee, chairman and CEO, Symphony RetailAI. “With 2020 just around the corner, we’ve seen significant reinvention begin to take place across the grocery retail and CPG industries. But the work is far from done – in fact, only 16% of retailers are leveraging AI today, according to our recent study with RIS News on AI and merchandise management. For the significant majority of retailers who have not deployed AI solutions, adoption in 2020 is critical for driving growth and profit in the next decade.”
Symphony RetailAI will continue to demonstrate the success its customers have seen with AI at NRF 2020 Vision: Retail’s Big Show, Jan. 12-14 in NYC, where attendees will have the opportunity to interact with CINDE and demo the personal decision coach’s latest capabilities.
About Symphony RetailAI
Symphony RetailAI is the leading global provider of role-specific, AI-enabled revenue growth management solutions and customer-centric insights for retailers and CPG manufacturers across the entire value chain. Our proven, industry-leading, AI-enabled software, coupled with the industry’s only conversational natural-language AI interface, CINDE, provides key users with proven prescriptive and preemptive recommendations that make it easy to identify end-to-end growth opportunities, activate plans, and realize measurable profit and revenue growth. Our solutions are specific to key decision-maker roles focused on profitable growth across the retail value chain from source to consumer. With our strong global partner ecosystem, we serve more than 1,200 organizations worldwide – including 15 of the top 25 global grocery retailers, 25 of the top 25 global CPG manufacturers, thousands of retail brands, and hundreds of national and regional chains – all through the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Symphony RetailAI is a SymphonyAI company. More at www.symphonyretailai.com.
Connect with Symphony RetailAI and CINDE on social media:
Twitter: @CINDE_AI
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/symphonyretailai/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SymphonyRetail/
About SymphonyAI
SymphonyAI is a group of companies that provide the leading AI-centric solutions for transforming the business enterprise by driving revenue growth and operational excellence, for the retail, CPG, healthcare and industrial verticals, and for finance, IT and other key enterprise horizontal functions. Founded by Dr. Romesh Wadhwani, SymphonyAI is one of the fastest growing companies in the business-to-business AI solutions sector with revenue this year of $275 million and 1,500 employees. More at www.symphonyai.com.
Media Contact
Adrienne Newcomb
Ketner Group Communications (for Symphony RetailAI)
adrienne@ketnergroup.com
512-794-8876
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1 Symphony RetailAI Xcelerate Forum: AI Up Front and Center, Retail Systems Research