IRI’s Industry-Leading Tools for Marketers Leverage AI and Machine Learning for Faster, Smarter, Integrated Insights and Solutions

IRI, a global leader in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail, and media companies, announced that as a result of its extensive investments and research, it has implemented artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning enhancements to its offerings to improve the cutting-edge analytics solutions IRI provides for CPG brands, over-the-counter healthcare organizations, retailers, and media companies. These AI and machine learning-enabled enhancements help marketers to leverage disruptive technology while uncovering and harnessing real-time insights to drive growth.

“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. 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,” said Krishnakumar Davey, President Strategic Analytics, IRI.

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IRI is applying AI and machine learning algorithms across the industry-leading Liquid Data technology platform with a number of highly sophisticated solutions, including:

IRI Demand Forecasting: IRI is revolutionizing the way companies approach forecasting by providing a fully automated forecasting tool at scale. Incorporating forecasting and simulation capabilities from the most sophisticated machine learning algorithms, IRI Demand Forecasting is designed to select the best model from tens of thousands of options. Minimizing the need for human discretion and extended cycle times, IRI Demand Forecasting helps marketing, finance, and sales teams at CPG clients to quickly identify opportunities to drive sales growth.

IRI Revenue Management Solutions: IRI Revenue Management solutions help IRI customers to optimize and track their price and promotion strategies. The new Price Recommendation Engine leverages machine learning to evaluate products, competitors, retailers, and geographies and subsequently identify pricing and promotion opportunities. Users are systematically able to explore, filter, and prioritize to optimize their pricing and promotion.

IRI Assortment Optimization: Retail customer teams already utilize the solution to create growth, rationalize efficiently, defend shelf space, and sell-in innovations by identifying high- and low-incrementality items and optimizing category sales. However, IRI now offers clients the opportunity to 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 a retailer for clients.

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IRI Aisle Optimization: IRI can help clients refine the composition of their product categories and the space of each category within the store using highly specific prescriptive insights, and this self-serve solution makes automated recommendations for optimal layouts that can improve sales productivity. IRI’s Aisle Optimization solution captures information across all departments, aisles, and categories evaluate sales performance and space productivity and leverage AI-driven predictive models and machine-powered simulation capabilities to assess the potential impact of changing space and location on category sales. Automating these processes empowers teams to quickly evaluate options and enhances data-driven decision making.

IRI Marketing Effectiveness: IRI’s marketing effectiveness solution leverages AI and machine learning to tackle the three major challenges facing marketers as they look to improve their marketing ROI: 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, reducing data setup times by up to 50 percent. This solution also leverages machine learning to ensure that disparate data sources are cleansed and integrated appropriately, and will alert users promptly should it encounter data issues. With the power of AI and machine learning, what used to be a laborious remodeling process is now automated and updated to produce robust models with near real-time insights every quarter. The marketing effectiveness solution offers the ability to automate media spend recommendations, simulating and optimizing across tens of thousands of marketing spend scenarios, enabling always-on planning.

IRI Trend Spotting: IRI’s Trend Spotting is a fully scalable, dynamic, and real-time algorithm that uses AI and machine learning techniques to spot trends and anomalies. It 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.

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