Consumer goods manufacturing is becoming more and more customized. While this directly benefits the consumers, it creates an immense strain on the already burgeoning retail supply chain.
In an already cut-throat market, decisions on store-level distribution, on-shelf stocking, and merchandising need to be data-driven and executed with speed. The goal with technology adoption is not just real-time visibility anymore. Retail leaders today desire to have complete control of what happens to all their products and promotions when they hit the retail shelves across thousands of outlets.
Infilect Technologies is challenging the ethos of manual intervention by redefining merchandising audits and gathering retail insights. By combining Artificial Intelligence with Computer Vision technology, Infilect is enabling retail brands to gather finer details of their in-store execution, track on-shelf product availability, monitor store compliances and help optimize their trade marketing pay-outs in real-time.
“Digital transformation in physical retail has been the final frontier for retail industries and always received scepticism until the pandemic came knocking. What was once perceived as a cost center has become indispensable. This shift in perception welcomes the pace at which AI tools are being adopted and drive value at various levels in the retail ecosystem in a cost-effective manner.”, commented Naresh Sethi, Infilect’s global chief growth evangelist and present chairman at VST industries, an Indian public conglomerate associated with British American Tobacco.
Traditional manual audits undertaken by market research firms pose severe limitations and challenges. “While we are always expanding our operations, manual audits allow only gathering of data once a month from a fraction of the stores, providing only coarse-grained information of our retail execution performance. Adopting Image Recognition and AI tools was a game-changer, especially when we wished to stay ahead of the competitors and execute winning retail strategies.”, explains a noted Modern trade head from India’s top personal care manufacturer.
“Sales leaders today want to achieve speed and scale in gathering in-store data by covering over 20,000 and more stores. This scale is not possible with market research firms that cover less than 2% of this scale today through manual audits. Whereas our “AI-auditor” is highly scalable and empowers merchandisers, salesman, and store staff with information on product stock levels, execution metrics, and more. This enables them to pro-actively fix execution errors and gaps immediately, thus making them an integral extension of the retail operation.” explains Vijay Gabale, Co-founder, and CTO at Infilect Technologies, a leader in Visual Intelligence empowering global CPG brands with real-time retail analytics and store-level execution insights.
This has a very profound impact on in-store brand visibility, enabling pre-planned distribution & store fulfillment, and re-claiming lagging market share. CPG leaders today are using Infilect’s Image Recognition solutions to stay ahead of the market by gaining real-time competitor insights and compliance monitoring, which was not possible with manual audits.
The physical retail universe is dynamic and complex. While modern retail environments provide a certain degree of predictability and uniformity, unorganized retail remains at the other end of the spectrum. “This poses considerable challenges for the technology to consider real-world complexities and gather accurate data. That’s where our solution has driven proven operational excellence and provided considerable value to retail brands with a sizable presence in the Asian and Latin American markets”, adds Anand Prabhu Subramanian, Co-founder, and CEO at Infilect technologies.
Image Recognition and AI will be the next pillar for any digital transformation strategy for CPG companies today. With the pace at which consumers’ expectations are evolving, retail brands cannot afford to be the laggards in adopting advanced tech stack as their long-term digitization game plan.
“Image Recognition and AI are all set to redefine shopping experience inside a store. Today, there is no other industry where so many retail leaders ascribe higher importance to adopting real-time data than the consumer goods industry.”, concluded Vijay.
Infilect is an Enterprise SaaS provider for retail manufacturers, retail brands, and retailers. With innovations in Image Recognition and AI, Infilect’s products empower the retail industry with unprecedented visibility into omnichannel sales, in-store merchandising, and store operations. Infilect is trusted by global customers and partners and is backed by Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, and The Chennai Angels. For more information, visit the website.