Image Recognition-based retail execution is enabling manufacturers, retailers, and merchandisers worldwide to understand their market and react dynamically
CPG manufacturers today need efficient and profitable retail execution processes while ensuring maximum adherence to compliance standards. Manufacturers today are quickly adapting to the new era of AI and Image Recognition to deliver the next level of customer experience, empower their front-liners or field forces and supplement their retail businesses.
The Image Recognition market is projected to grow up to $53B approximately by 2025 and top CPG brands are the front runners in experiencing the real value in implementing it. Brands today could benefit vastly from the real-time intelligence Image Recognition and AI technology-enabled platforms can provide. Instantly identifying out-of-stock items, recognizing stores that provide lower shelf-share to stores that do not follow brand compliance and set planograms, Image Recognition is becoming an irreplaceable business intelligence or sales recommendation tool for retail business leaders.
"Gone are the days where every merchandiser visiting a retail outlet for a store audit conducted manual counting of products present on the shelf and logging it into a report-based application. Market intelligence and research firms collate the data gathered from a sampled set of stores over a few weeks and ship the report to business leaders. In other words, this makes manual audits inaccurate, time-consuming, and laborious.", adds Anand Prabhu Subramanian, Co-founder, and CEO of Infilect technologies, a retail visual intelligence leader. Some of the top CPG brands have been using Infilect's Image Recognition solutions for the last few years to gather real-time information on their on-shelf and in-store execution of their products, promotions, and pricing, from every store, at scale. This in turn empowers CPG brands to make dynamic retail decisions that improve per-store sales, help determine better Route-To-Market strategies and help optimize retailer payouts.
With handheld AI auditing tools, merchandisers now can do more than just gather data at the store. By simply clicking a few images of the retail shelves, the Image Recognition algorithm can process these images to detect every object and SKU present on the images and provide accurate shelf metrics in less than 1 minute. This enables merchandisers to take instant actions on mitigating execution issues on the spot before they leave the store, thus instantly improving the in-store visibility of a brand and fixing execution errors on the spot.
"Digitizing of store audits are a much-needed necessity today. With stiff competition from the competing brands, business leaders today are demanding real-time visibility into every category of products, in every store, every day! This is non-negotiable. Sooner or later not having real-time visibility into stores can cause a detrimental impact on the brand and a serious pushback on your market share. Top CPG brands know this well." Adds Naveen Keswani, Infilect's business growth leader in the APAC region, and an FMCG veteran who has played a key role in driving sales initiatives for global FMCG brands across Asia.
Retail sales leaders are battling many challenges when it comes to executing a successful retail execution strategy. One is ensuring a top-level merchandising performance by visiting the field force. "A merchandiser can be a great source of ground-level truth. But merchandisers today pretty much fulfill the role of data gathered from one store to another. Real-time shelf data & execution insights can enable merchandisers to act inside the store and fix execution issues, compliance errors, and even planogram mistakes before they leave the store.", explains Anand.
With physical stores being the central engine in driving retail sales, Image Recognition can deliver true business value to many leading CPG brands across the world. "One of our long-time customers has been using our Image Recognition solutions to determine the right mix of assortments to be shipped to the right stores in the right quantity. With integration to sales data, the customers can plan their distribution at a per-store level. Many leaders are increasingly recognizing the power of Image Recognition as an indispensable tool that enables them to make smarter retail decisions dynamically.", concludes Anand.
About Infilect: 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.
