SymphonyAI has announced its suite of software copilots for retailers and CPG manufacturers, bringing powerful generative AI capabilities to its intelligent merchandising, supply chain, and store and space product suite. SymphonyAI unveiled the Category Manager Copilot and Demand Planner Copilot at the company’s Xcelerate 2023 summit in Paris today. The solutions strengthen and speed retail teams’ decision making and business impact.
A first for the industry, SymphonyAI is using the transformative power of predictive and generative AI to address the challenge of sub-optimal decision making that results from incomplete and siloed data and processes in retailers and CPGs as well as the overwhelming complexity of trying to gain meaningful, timely insights. With a unified, AI-driven, and shared-data approach, SymphonyAI solutions help users make context-aware decisions that balance different teams’ business priorities organization-wide while reducing analysis cycles from days or hours to minutes or seconds. The SymphonyAI retail copilots work seamlessly with SymphonyAI’s intelligent, connected retail AI applications to help retailers and CPGs uncover meaningful insights, recommendations, and actions.
The copilots’ natural language interface lets users intuitively understand and interact with the underlying predictive and analytic AI that shows what’s happening and why, so they can ask “what if” questions to uncover specific, actionable opportunities. The SymphonyAI retail copilots, built on the SymphonyAI Eureka GenAI architecture and part of the CINDE GenAI suite of retail AI applications, use highly sophisticated generative AI with specialized domain expertise, a proprietary retail-trained large language model (LLM), and workflows for breakthrough productivity and accuracy.
The SymphonyAI Category Manager Copilot removes the time-consuming element of pulling together reports and insights for weekly category reviews, so category managers can use the information for rapid high-impact decision making. It unearths drivers of sales changes and corresponding opportunities quicker and more deeply, reducing hours of analysis to seconds, allowing teams to pursue more growth-focused actions faster. The copilot also makes internal and external collaboration easier and quicker, with automated updates so that findings do not have to be constantly refreshed and re-sent.
The SymphonyAI Category Manager Copilot uses tuned, relevant retail agents and skills, along with predictive models, data, and the SymphonyAI retail LLM, to “think” like a category manager, understanding the user’s intent and navigating complex data to comprehend, diagnose, predict, summarize, and generate recommendations with best-practice next steps. The breakthrough generative AI copilot provides the rapid, relevant guidance and insight users might expect from an amazing assistant, including guiding users through scenarios to boost individual and team skills.
The Category Manager Copilot has the ability to:
- Understand the context and intent of users’ questions and ask for clarity where needed.
- See beyond the surface answer and identify all performance-affecting factors to generate the best recommendation.
- Remove manual tasks such as report and dashboard creation, automatically generating the visuals and narratives for clarity and consensus-building.
- Automate knowledge-sharing by guiding users through different potential scenarios and assembling clear next steps.
As Forrester Research, Inc. wrote in The Top 10 Emerging Technologies in 2023, “Generative AI will augment workflows, create scale, and drive innovation. In just a matter of months, generative AI has moved from casual fascination to the promise of tangible value. It provides the ability to create shortcuts for onerous workflow tasks, speed up delivery times, and enhance employee productivity across multiple enterprise workflows.”[i]
The Demand Planner Copilot simplifies processes and tackles complex questions that demand planners have as they investigate inventory levels and inspect the impact of promotions on sales. The copilot works with SymphonyAI’s Demand Forecasting AI application to provide instant insights so demand planners can adjust inventory levels and make better-informed decisions, greatly reducing insight-to-action time.
Similar to the Category Manager Copilot, the Demand Planner Copilot uses the SymphonyAI Retail LLM to support a demand planner’s queries, summarize and display relevant information, and generate insights into supply chain data and promotion results.
The Demand Planner Copilot has the ability to:
- Understand the context and intent of users’ questions to provide more complete, high-quality communication.
- Drill into data to unearth previously hidden connections and results to drive more informed, high-impact decisions.
- Provide details behind analysis for full explainability and transparency to help users quickly embrace the technology and speed up widespread adoption.
“As we have in our other verticals, we are aggressively rolling out for our customers — retailers and CPGs — a visionary and bold set of products that will bring huge new productivity savings and transformational insights,” said Manish Choudhary, president and CEO of SymphonyAI Retail CPG. “The SymphonyAI team continues its aggressive strategy of forward-thinking and robust investments that provide a combustible mix of enterprise-scale predictive AI with domain-rich, specialized generative AI. Our copilots are positioned to create an explosion of productivity and growth opportunities in retail and beyond.”
