A Billion Dollar Brand
They are a billion-dollar retailer with the same complexity and opportunity as many of you reading this article. They have hundreds of stores, multiple websites and are active in three major marketplaces. They have a vibrant loyalty program complemented by an in-house private label credit program. They have five primary seasons, and products that range from consumables to seasonal repurchases to the one-off, big-ticket, heavily considered luxury items. Their leadership team understands that all of the above creates data, and in that data lives opportunity.
Leadership recognized the growth of their brand will be largely determined by their ability to harness their data.
The senior leadership team was profoundly aligned to the role of data in their retail strategies. They recognized the opportunity to weaponize seasons as a discrete strategy for customer lifecycle optimization. They understood that new-to-customer category expansion was insulation from competitive threats in addition to driving profitability and mitigating churn. They understood that marketplaces were tools for optimizing the value of their customers (vs. just another sales channel). They had long ago stopped measuring success in top-line sales and switched to net customer contribution.
Following the typical path – models & more
Like many of you, they had invested in technology and team. Their data was centralized, they had something that resembled a single customer view, and data science and business analysts were aligned.
They experimented with a few “models” from their Customer Data Platform – and saw some lift. Their internal teams also started to produce some results. Project by project, they followed the next logical step to build some basic propensity models, worked on moving beyond RFM for churn risk, and did their best to operationalize & monetize production models.
“We experienced a lot of small-scale wins, which only made leadership hungry for large-scale change”.
At an average cost of 4 – 6 weeks per model and with mounting pressure to not only “build more models” but also develop a “comprehensive AI strategy” – the retailer decided to take a look and see what might be out in the market that could accelerate their AI transformation.
A turnkey retail AI strategy (delivered as technology)
OpenINSIGHTS, in cooperation with Google, offered a “full stack” strategy to support Artificial Intelligence within the retailer’s enterprise.
A core truth behind any successful AI strategy; success requires multiple AIs working together (much like your teams do today).
The team at OpenINSIGHTS had created a turnkey “productized” strategy enabled through “bolt-on” technology – unlocking the retailer’s enterprise data through a suite of different AI’s that work together to produce results.
AI Opportunity Agents – monitor for opportunities within the retail enterprise, focusing on changes in the customer lifecycle, managing seasons, and optimizing customer spend across both products and properties (stores, sites, marketplaces).
Audience AI – receives and responds to prompts from Opportunity Agents to automatically create the best possible audience for the AI-identified Opportunity.
GenAI Prompts – enables 1-to-1 individualization of “the audience to opportunity” through content creation/selection, support of customer preferred channel, and informing offer/media channel mobilization (from paid to earn to print). They call it “contextual individualization.”
The AI Opportunity Strategy was based on common Customer Analytics and Insights practices, best practices in the world of programmatic marketing automation, and adhering to – but modernizing – the concepts of relevance driving revenue.
If an analyst is looking for specific signals in your data, AI can do the same – at a scale and with fidelity no human can achieve.
In this case, the retail brand found that the AI not only aligned immediately with their enterprise’s strategic goals and outcomes but also provided the paths to support the tactical use cases (stores vs. digital, loyalty tier/credit awareness).
The strategy wasn’t some of the parts, but rather the sum of all parts.
It is critical to note that “bolt on” truly means bolt on – where the brand deployed the OpenINSIGHTS Customer AI platform against its legacy data warehouse and introduced the Audience AI into their existing marketing and advertising workflows – in roughly 100 days.
Opportunity AI: $126M in the last 12 months
The brand deployed multiple AI Opportunity Agents in the last 12 months. The specific agents uncovered billions of unique customer opportunities, including:
- Customer Lifecycle – expanding the active customer file through improved acquisition while optimizing it’s health through churn mitigation/winback – 2.5x increase in ROAS over CDP/Propensity models (Acquisition – paid media) – 2x churn reactivation rate (print/earned media)
- Wallet Management – ensuring customer repurchase and new-to-customer category expansion – 5x increase in new-to-category purchase expansion (paid media / email)
- Seasonal Lifecycle – proactive planning and intra-season customer/sales optimization – 4x ROAS increase customer activation new-to-season (Acquisition – paid media) – 3x seasonal reactivation rate (print/earned media)
Results are not only referenceable with the retail brand, but were the product of intentional testing by the brand themselves. With every deployed program, industry-standard test methodology was followed, including hold-out models (when possible) and/or year-over-year performance analysis (when holdouts were unavailable).
Opportunity AI: A quarter billion in 2025
Where is the brand going next? More Agents and More Scale. In addition to agents that monitor and respond to sales performance across the enterprise, the retailer is in the process of fully automating the programs they had been testing. The estimated 12-month impact impact, at full-scale deployment, is between a quarter to a half billion dollars in incremental sales.
“We didn’t want to compete on insights, we want to win on AI.”
<Shameless Plug>Proofcamp: The Ultimate Proof of Concept
Don’t take our word for it. Google Cloud and OpenINSIGHTS have partnered together to provide qualified retail brands a complimentary Proof of Concept. Our Proofcamp is far from your typical “single-use case” POC. It’s your data, in your cloud, with your own Opportunity AI that you get to monetize across multiple Opportunity Agents – delivered in 120 days or less.