8/23/2024

Five cool store operations AI rollouts from a hot summer

Retailers are using AI in the store.

Retailers are increasingly "minding the store" with artificial intelligence.

As always, late August has arrived far more quickly than anyone could anticipate. While summer technically doesn’t end for several weeks, most people view the sunny season ending when the calendar flips to September.

To celebrate the summer of 2024 with a retail tech twist, let’s look back at five innovative AI rollouts that focused on store operations.

Harmons Grocery

Offering an assortment of hundreds of thousands of products, Utah-based upscale supermarket chain Harmons Grocery found capturing data and running reports to be difficult and time-consuming.

This posed issues to employees trying to use data to make decisions about staffing and products. In addition, store managers defaulted to basing decisions on inaccurate prior-year data and numbers.

To resolve these challenges, Harmons integrated all of its disparate sales, operations and marketing systems into Domo’s single cloud-based, AI-equipped data management platform.

As a result, Harmon’s can now track and analyze data streams such as sales, expenses, and staffing into a single "source of truth." This, in turn, helps Harmons keep its shelves stocked with products customers want and have the real-time insights needed to ensure an optimal shopping experience.

Sainsbury’s

Leading U.K. supermarket retailer Sainsbury’s is rolling out the NCR Voyix Commerce Platform, POS solutions and self-checkout systems to 22,500 checkouts.

Leveraging NCR Voyix hosted cloud technology, Sainsbury’s will receive real-time data and analytics on store operations while also utilizing artificial intelligence to better analyze sales, estimate future store performance, improve productivity and manage cash.

Sainsbury’s hopes to obtain the flexibility to adapt to market trends more quickly with this AI-based analytical capability. The new platform will also enable associates to approve transactions remotely via tablet, which Sainsbury’s hopes will speed up the checkout process. And AI-based self-checkout terminals will deliver personalized promotions uniquely tailored to each customer.

Target

Target Corp. is rolling out a new proprietary generative AI chatbot called Store Companion that will help store associates answer customer inquiries, answer on-the-job process questions, coach new team members and support store operations management.

The new chatbot will be available as an app on specially equipped handheld employee devices, providing immediate answers to their questions about processes and procedures. For example, associates can input prompts like "How do I sign a guest up for a Target Circle Card?" and "How do I restart the cash register in the event of a power outage?" and receive instructions and resources in seconds.

To develop Store Companion, Target used real frequently asked questions and process documents from its store teams across the U.S.

Tractor Supply Company

The nation’s largest rural lifestyle retailer has rolled out the Co-Pilot AI platform from store operations technology provider Quorso in an effort to simplify daily work for store-level and field managers while driving sales, customer service and other key in-store performance indicators.

The Co-Pilot solution provides store and field managers with personalized, top-priority actions and intelligent workflows designed to improve store operations. These data-driven insights can address a wide range of issues including out of stock inventory, planogram execution, product attachment and customer service.

In addition, the solution provides managers with a real-time view of the results of their actions. Tractor Supply Company’s deployment of Quorso Co-Pilot is part of a larger effort to improve store operations and customer experience with advanced technology.

Wendy’s

The Wendy’s Company is building upon a pilot of artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud drive-thru technology. In May 2023, the fast-food chain moved into pilot with the “Wendy’s FreshAI” platform based on Google Cloud's generative AI and large language models technology.

FreshAI includes Google Cloud solutions such as the Looker business intelligence and analytics tool, as well as the Anthos modernization platform and utilizes Google Cloud generative AI solutions, such as Vertex AI, to automatically conduct conversations with customers, understand made-to-order requests and generate responses to frequently asked questions.

Since December 2023, Wendy’s has expanded the FreshAI rollout to 28 corporate restaurants in Ohio and Florida and plans to continue expanding FreshAI across all corporate locations in the U.S.