Leading and celebrated CPG leaders from around the globe gathered at Infilect’s first-of-its-kind CPG thought leadership roundtable, conducted virtually on 25th August 2022, to exchange powerful thoughts of change and discuss new ideas. Infilect is a global leader in providing retail visual intelligence for leading CPG brands and retailers. Infilect’s solutions deliver real-time and most accurate retail analytics & execution insights, using Image Recognition and AI technology, to ease retail decision-making and provide significant growth in per-store sales. The speaker panel consisted of CPG sales leaders, retail technology experts and CPG veterans, from across the globe. Driving efficiency in retail execution and boosting store profitability was the central focus along with the role of AI in bringing innovation to the global CPG brands.

The roundtable was hosted and moderated by Infilect’s co-founder/CEO, subject matter expert and able technocrat, Anand Prabhu Subramanian along with global marketing leader and Mrs. India worldwide 2021 winner, Amisha Sethi. Anand kickstarted the discussion with a strong emphasis on the importance of embracing the ‘goldmine of real-time retail insights’ using Image Recognition. “One of the key pillars of digital transformation for CPG manufacturers should be to generate efficiency at every touchpoint. If the right tools are used to obtain the intelligent data in real-time, it is going to be game-changing.”, Anand added.

The data that was being enriched from stores on monthly syndicated views has now moved to weekly, daily, or even hourly syndicated views. “In digital retailing, you can track every click, and every purchase being made. Whereas in physical retail, you may have information of the sell-in and sell-out of products via POS systems, but what happens in between remains a black box.”, said Peter Townsend, Managing Partner at Data Sense Inc, Canada-based IT services, data analytics, and retail innovation firm.

Understanding your competitors' strategies becomes paramount with consumers spoiled for choice at the retail shelves. Vincent Eyimeh, a key account manager at Dulux Nigeria Plc, with over 10+ years of experience in retail sales re-iterated the same. “That's why it’s important to understand your consumers and execute your core in-store sales programs well, which include product quality, visibility, promotions, and pricing.”, he added.

The CPG universe is sensitive to any extraordinary events like the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, which led to large-scale panic buying, on-shelf stockouts, and tectonic shifts in consumer expectations. Iesha Queen, sales director at Glanbia Nutritionals, who has been in the nutrition industry for more than 15 years shared her views on the state of store sales in the US. “While certain CPG sectors faced dire challenges in addressing store sales, a few product categories saw a steep decline in sales during 2020. New categories emerged at the top, especially in health, nutrition, grocery, wellness, and fitness.”, she added.

Ravi Chaturvedi, a recognized industry veteran and the first-ever and former Asian President, and a member of the Global Leadership Council of Procter and Gamble (P&G) shared a compelling fact. “When it comes to boosting store sales and marketing ROI, deciphering what is effective can be extremely important before we focus on driving efficiency.”

Empowering store staff or field reps with real-time insights can be an on-ground advantage and extended arm to the retail operations. To this, Oyelere Atoyebi, Head, Sales Strategy for Promasidor Nigeria Group, added “It is all about how well you can leverage what resource is available at hand. Like I do say, data is not going to solve your problem, but data will tell you exactly where the problem is.” 

“Technology innovations like AI and Image Recognition have given back the ‘sense and respond’ capability to the CPG leaders to quickly ‘act and react’.”, explained Peter. Image Recognition & AI technology today can deliver instant in-store visibility to identify out-of-stock scenarios, and poor implementation of promotions, pricing and planograms and ultimately empower sales leaders to gain better control of their retail execution and boost store profitability, at scale.

Consumer behaviour is changing every day and it is very important to capture this information in real-time directly at the store shelves. This enables CPG sales teams to act and react faster to not lose their Share of Shelf or market share.”, added Anderson Soares, a sales leader & consumer marketing head at a multinational personal care corporation in Latin American markets.

The roundtable concluded on a high note with a common synergy on the important role of Image Recognition and AI in addressing key challenges in implementing a flawless retail execution, at scale. With speed and accuracy being the need of the hour, Infilect’s Image Recognition solutions today are providing sales leaders with rich, fine-grained insights into their retail execution. AI-assisted sales recommendations that could uncover previously unknown black boxes in the world of retail execution.

Infilect plans to soon orchestrate yet another CPG roundtable in November, encouraging retail business leaders, and retail-tech experts to register as speakers and share noteworthy ideas with the global retail community.