Innovation in FMCG Led by Infilect, Image Recognition for Store Profitability

The by-gone pandemic was a wake-up call to all FMCG leaders. There is an increased focus on optimizing on-shelf assortment planning, distribution, and inventory optimization. While data-centric is a good approach, having data arrive just in time can bring a competitive advantage enabling retail leaders with innovative decision-making capability.

There is a myriad of challenges when it comes to driving retail execution efficacy and store profitability. Lack of store-level execution insights and access to key insights such as Share of the shelf. On-shelf product availability leaves sales leaders grappling with out-of-stock or overstocking of products on the shelves. Heavy reliance on time-consuming manual store audits only provides piecemeal information on the in-store products, promotions, and pricing information. “With merchandisers spending hours and hours on manual product counting, there is very little time and energy left in retailer management, relationship building and proactively fixing execution issues. With the intervention of AI technology here, there will be significant delays in fixing issues like planogram non-compliance, incorrect product placements, and out-of-stock situations,” says Anand Prabhu Subramanian, Co-Founder & CEO, Infilect, a leader in retail visual intelligence, recently recognized and featured by CB insights as one of the leading companies providing value to FMCG brands and large format retailers worldwide

The Indian FMCG market is projected to grow up to $220 Billion by 2025. With rising consumer demand and increasing product categories, leaders are now supplementing their retail operation with an AI tech stack to simplify large-scale decision-making. Image Recognition is one such technology that provides rich and most accurate shelf intelligence and in-store execution insights from every store. Sales leaders can now optimize their retail execution, ensure 100% store compliances and save on trade pay-outs. This in turn helps retail leaders to improve their in-store sales and marketing ROI, at scale.

“Retail visual analytics is an important milestone in the retail technology space. Never in the history of retail technology has there been ready access to visual proofs of what happens to the products in the last 100 metres of the value chain. Image Recognition & AI has made that possible,” explains Anand.

Image Recognition technology enables the retail field force to automatically derive on-shelf analytics by taking a picture of the shelf with their phone. Sales & marketing departments get all retail execution insights in real-time to adjust, shift or tweak their in-store sales strategies across all product categories & SKUs in real-time.

Image Recognition for Efficient Assortment Planning and Optimization of Distribution

In the context of machine vision, image recognition is the ability of software to identify objects, places, people, writing, and actions in images. Computers can use machine vision technologies combined with a camera and artificial intelligence software to achieve image recognition.

Gathering in-store execution data at scale has been an age-old problem for FMCG brands. With Image Recognition and AI, gathering in-store execution data at speed and scale makes store audits automated and simplified. This is made possible by enabling merchandisers to capture a few pictures of the retail shelves using their mobile cameras. The Image Recognition AI then processes the captured images. With Image Recognition, leaders now have all critical retail execution insights and competitive intelligence at their fingertips. They can now create data-backed & personalized strategies to improve their in-store brand visibility, focus on enhancing per-store sales, and achieve sustainable distribution & store fulfillment.

About Infilect: Infilect is a leader in retail visual intelligence provider to FMCG brands worldwide. Thanks to our patented Image Recognition and AI technology, sales leaders can now take complete control of their retail shelves, prevent out-of-stock situations and improve in-store brand visibility, at scale. Infilect processes over 25 million retail images per month worldwide to gather advanced retail intelligence, at a scale. Infilect is backed by Mela Ventures, 1Crowd, and other angel investors and is headquartered in India and US. For more information, visit: www.infilect.com

Media contact: anand@infilect.com