Post-event recap: How retailers are embracing AI to accelerate their analytics journey

Post-event recap: How retailers are embracing AI to accelerate their analytics journey

Recently, we organised a special event in partnership with Google to help retailers understand how to use AI to accelerate their data and analytics journey. 

Unlike many industry events, ours gave attendees real-world examples of data and analytics best practices from executives at Moss and G-Star RAW – two retailers that have developed market-leading data and analytics capabilities powered by Composable AI (more on this later).

The evening started with opening remarks by Jonathan Summerfield, CEO and Founder of Xiatech, who welcomed everyone with comments about how retailers are leading in adopting AI to transform their businesses and customer experiences. 

Following Jonathan, Aaraa Shah, Xiatech’s client partner for Moss, and Peter Hanlon, Head of BI and Analytics at Xiatech, shared how the UK’s no.1 formal menswear specialist rapidly transformed itself over the past couple of years by embracing the power of analytics.  

Facing an unprecedented trading environment coming out of the pandemic, including a huge demand for weddings, coupled with changes in consumer behaviour, such as a preference to work from home, Moss realised the need for better customer insights. 

Overcoming technical issues such as siloed data, excel-based reporting and limited in-house analytics capabilities, Moss engaged Xiatech and, using its Xfuze platform, successfully created a 360-degree view of customers including an end-to-end understanding of the customer lifecycle that resulted in improved customer satisfaction and sales (please read the case study here). 

In the words of Brett Grobler, Head of IT at Moss: “Xiatech has enabled us to fundamentally transform into a data-driven, connected retailer so all aspects of our business are focused on and empowered with insights to understand and serve our customers in a personal, relevant way.”   

After the Moss success story, Suzanne Garritsen, Head of Data and Analytics at G-Star RAW, the global denim brand, shared how the retailer optimises its business using advanced analytics. 

At the heart of G-Star’s analytics journey is the importance of customer data.  Following a change in the retailer’s business model, there was recognition to obtain a 360-degree view of customers.

Suzanne talked about how the retailer established the important data foundation for advanced analytics by integrating data from numerous customer channels into a single view.  This data includes product, inventory, loyalty, sentiment analysis, and other sources, all of which feeds Bloomreach (CDP) and Google Cloud (GCP).  This single view of customers has enabled the retailer to improve customer segmentation, generate a higher return on marketing and predict customer lifetime value.   

After Suzanne’s remarkable talk, Jonathan Summerfield, CEO and founder of Xiatech, shared with the attendees why retailers are embracing Composable AI.

Jonathan started with a compelling fact that though 84% of global business organisations believe AI will give them a competitive advantage, 85% of artificial intelligence and machine learning projects fail to produce a return for the business.  A reason for the high failure rate is organisations are using the same traditional waterfall approach they embrace when integrating data and systems to build, test and deploy AI.  This is a slow and costly way to embrace AI when, today, speed is a competitive necessity. 

Jonathan then discussed the importance of taking a business outcome first approach to deploying AI and doing so over time to generate incremental value using Composable AI, the modern, modular-first framework that integrates multiple AI models so they can collaborate with each other across an ecosystem of technologies, data and processes using the Xfuze platform.

Jonathan ended his presentation with a final comment about the strategic partnership between Xiatech and Google, and how both companies are working together to help organisations adopt AI and, specifically, how Composable AI is an accelerator for organisations. 

The final presentation of the evening was from Alex Rutter, Google Cloud’s Director of Retail, Travel & CPG in the United Kingdom, who shared his views, and a number of statistics, on the rapid adoption of AI. In short, it’s not a question of “if” to deploy but “how,” and this plays very well into the earlier talk from Jonathan on the value of Composable AI. To reinforce the point about the market adoption of AI, in 2024, 63% retailers are using AI compared to just 28% in 2023.

If you would like to learn more about how retailers are using our cloud-native Xfuze integration and data platform to accelerate their AI and analytics journey, and to improve business performance, please schedule time with one of our experts here.