IRI Adds AI and Machine Learning to Analytics
IRI has added artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to its Strategic Analytics and Liquid Data offerings to help marketers uncover and harness real-time insights.
"IRI's use of AI and machine learning provides three key advantages to clients: speed to insights and action, scalability, and enhanced ability to manage successfully through the complex sales and marketing landscape," said Krishnakumar Davey, president of Strategic Analytics at IRI, in a statement. "Leveraging these emerging technologies puts IRI's solutions and the clients who use them at a distinct advantage for driving growth and at the intersection of big data analytics and automation. We are pleased to provide advanced analytics on our unique IRI Liquid Data platform, so our CPG and retailer clients can best collaborate to improve sales outcomes and marketing ROI."
IRI is applying AI and machine learning algorithms across its Liquid Data technology platform with the following solutions:
- IRI Demand Forecasting, to help marketing, finance, and sales teams identify opportunities to drive sales growth.
- IRI Revenue Management, to help users optimize and track price and promotion strategies. A new Price Recommendation Engine leverages machine learning to evaluate products, competitors, retailers, and geographies and subsequently identify pricing and promotion opportunities.
- IRI Assortment Optimization now helps users leverage machine learning to proactively look across retailers and products to alert opportunities. Patterns of incremental sales potential are prescriptively evaluated across millions of possible improvements. This recommendation engine pinpoints and prioritizes assortment opportunities by retailer.
- IRI Aisle Optimization, to help users refine the composition of their product categories and the space of each category within the store using highly specific prescriptive insights. This self-serve solution makes automated recommendations for optimal layouts; captures information across all departments, aisles, and categories; evaluates sales performance and space productivity; and leverages predictive models and simulations to assess the potential impact of changing space and location on category sales.
- IRI Marketing Effectiveness, to help marketers with data collection and integration, marketing mix modeling, and media planning. The solution automates data collection by ingesting and integrating disparate data sources, including media data and IRI sales and causal data. It also ensures that disparate data sources are cleansed and integrated and will alert users should it encounter data issues. It can calso produce robust models with near real-time insights every quarter and automate media spend recommendations.
- IRI Trend Spotting, a fully scalable, dynamic, and real-time algorithm that analyzes multidimensional historical data for products across geographies and key attributes using deep data mining techniques to identify sales patterns (and brands) that show consistent long-term trends or short-term growth spurts. It then automatically separates pure trends from investment-related growth and applies sophisticated clustering algorithms to UPC-level data to identify hot trends.