Smart & Final Deploys Hypersonix’s AI-Driven Analytics

By AIT News Desk On Jul 3, 2020

Cloud platform optimizes e-commerce and in-store capabilities for California retailer

Smart & Final is rolling out Hypersonix’s AI-driven analytics platform to support the company’s enterprise analytics and digital transformation initiatives. The two companies started working together sixty days ago on a successful pilot program. With this announcement, Smart & Final officially joins a handful of early adopters in the grocery and consumer-commerce industries turning to the innovative company to help navigate the post-COVID-19 market.

“Hypersonix is a key ingredient in leveraging actionable analytics that can be operationalized by our business teams as part of our on-going digital transformation,” said Ed Wong, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Smart & Final. “We established a great innovation-centric collaboration with Hypersonix where we are finding new ways to address our needs in key strategic areas for our business.”

Built by former executives from SAP, PayPal and IBM, and funded by Intel Capital, Hypersonix offers a cloud-based Unified Data Analytics Platform that is designed to ingest and integrate disparate data sources that reside in software applications from various vendors. These applications include Point-of-Sale, eCommerce, Merchandising, Marketing, and Inventory platforms. Hypersonix tears down data silos and provides a 360-degree view on customer behaviors, localized product assortments and operational processes, essentially becoming the glue to support data-driven decisions.

“Smart & Final is clearly a shopper-centric and innovative retailer, and we are excited to partner with them,” said Todd P. Michaud, President and Chief Customer Officer of Hypersonix. “As an increasingly data-driven culture, Smart & Final is leveraging our autonomous intelligence applications powered by robust data science and machine learning to enable profitable revenue growth.”

With Hypersonix, Smart & Final has empowered non-technical stakeholders with descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics. They have also helped Smart & Final understand how its various customer channels are doing while optimizing each channel to serve the rapidly changing needs of their online and in-store shoppers.

“Quickly turning insight into action is the key to success in today’s competitive retail environment,” said Joe VanDette, Group Vice President, Marketing at Smart & Final. “The accessible, conversational nature of Hypersonix’s platform allows our business leaders to leverage that insight directly, without the constraints typically associated with traditional data analysis.”

Unlike competing solutions, Hypersonix offers a simple “Google-like” user experience. This approach supports non-technical users across the organization to harness data-driven insights without dependency on data analysts or information technology professionals. This accessibility enables Smart & Final’s leaders to use text or voice to quickly query their data on any device including their computer, tablet, or smart phone. The Hypersonix platform, regardless of the user device, has been augmented with a virtual intelligent decision agent named “Jarvix,” which leverages the latest innovations in Natural Language Processing (NLP).