Dunnhumby unveils AI-powered assortment solution based on customer preferences
Dunnhumby, a global company specializing in customer data science, has launched its next-generation assortment solution, harnessing AI to revolutionize how retailers select products, the company touted.
The new features unveiled in Dunnhumby's assortment include:
Localized assortments: Retailers can now deliver hyper-localized assortments tailored to the unique preferences of their customer base, enabling a truly localized shopping experience, the company said.
Space-aware assortments and planograms: A new integrated planogram tool optimizes layout and facings, giving shelf-ready layouts based on customer behavior insights. The tool automatically accounts for merchandising rules, physical constraints and local health and safety restrictions, ensuring retailers can implement planograms with confidence knowing they will work seamlessly on the shelf.
A streamlined, end-to-end process: The end-to-end solution increases efficiency by enabling collaborative input from multiple teams throughout the assortment process, saving valuable time and resources.
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“In today’s dynamic retail landscape, keeping up with customer expectations while outpacing local competition is crucial,” said Jenn Dabbelt, global head of product, Dunnhumby. “Our new Assortment tool, powered by advanced AI, allows retailers to build store-specific assortments centered on what the customer wants. This supercharges retailers’ ability to deliver by streamlining the entire process from end to end, helping them bring to life exceptional experiences for customers.”
The new tool uses advanced AI, employing predictive analytics to quantify which products should be selected for which stores, before forecasting the impact of assortment changes across every location.
Hyper-localization AI: Certain products perform better in some stores than others - protein shakes sell well in stores near gyms, for example. Advances in dunnhumby’s AI means that retailers can now determine which products to select in more intelligent ways. By looking at the relationships between products and stores, advanced recommender systems can detect relationships and highlight opportunities with a much lower risk of error.
Planogram AI: By learning from existing planograms and customer behavior, retailers can use AI to choose assortments that optimize sales potential through space on the shelf. Not only does that save retailers’ time, but it also ensures that layouts are as intuitive as possible for customers.
Predictive AI: Predictive models show what will happen to customer demand when products are introduced to—or removed from—an assortment. For example, removing a certain pack size or flavor of cookie will not necessarily reduce category revenue by its full sales value. Dunnhumby’s AI lets retailers understand how much of those sales would transfer to a similar remaining product in the assortment, creating a more accurate forecast.
[Read more: Dunnhumby, Placer.ai partner to provide customer insights to retailers]
Julie Sharrocks, head of retail AI at Dunnhumby said, “Retailers need to be able to understand customer needs—and which products are most likely to satisfy them—quickly and at scale. With decades of refinement behind them, the AI tools, and techniques that we’ve built in Dunnhumby Assortment now allow retailers to do exactly that.”