Analytics Unite: Uncovering the Keys to Unified Intelligence

Keynote: Building and Advancing the Future of Unified Intelligence 

Tractor Supply’s Al Lettera, SVP of IT, and Glenn Allison, VP of IT applications development, took the stage by first drawing attention to an interesting prop: a cowbell.

The cowbell was a nod to the 2000 “Saturday Night Live” sketch with Will Ferrell, and Allison symbolically rang it during the keynote presentation to emphasize the industry’s frequent calls for more artificial intelligence.

Tractor Supply, the largest rural retailer in the U.S., was quick to embrace AI, putting forth many use cases and “quick wins” across its business. The goal has been to enhance the customer experience — which ultimately, the duo said, entails enhancing the associate experience, customer service, and inventory management. 

To gain momentum, a year ago, the Tractor Supply’s strategic leadership team started looking at a plethora of use cases, as well as where they could layer in AI experiences based on the investments they’re already making. During the presentation, Allison outlined some AI advancements Tractor Supply has made and is focusing on.

Read the extended coverage here.

Analytics Transformation for Omnichannel Excellence

To transform omnichannel experiences by leveraging analytics, companies need to build excellence across four dimensions, said Dipita Chakraborty, chief practice officer, CPG and retail, at Fractal — consumer centricity, innovation focus, product differentiation, and cost consciousness. 

Using data and analytics as catalysts, companies must ask themselves how they can create a foundation that can survive. 

The best organizations in retail and CPG, said Sekhar Krishnamoorthy, chief data and analytics officer for Mars’ global pet nutrition segment, translate down the digital capabilities required for these transformations, ensuring that solutions are modular and configurable rather than having to create a custom solution to every problem. 

“There are critical capabilities: the acquisition of data, hosting it in scalable infrastructure, governing it well, and then building analytics products that scale,” said Krishnamoorthy.

Often, it’s easier said than done, however. The challenges companies are facing include the inability to agree on common business measurements, insufficient data to support new technologies, and silos that block fast responses across functions and retailers.

Once companies overcome these obstacles, the secret sauce is providing holistic and integrated enterprise analytics supported by domain experts.  

Accelerating Secure AI and ML Without Complexity

In this breakout session, attendees learned the importance of adapting to tech advances and hitting your stride when implementing successful AI and data strategies. 

Angie Coderre, enterprise business architect for data intelligence at US Foods, joined Snowflake’s Prabhath Nanisetty to discuss how the food service industry can balance innovations in this space without getting bogged down in excessive complexity or compromising on security. 

Centralizing data has been the name of the game when it comes to this, Coderre explained. By breaking down siloes, large food service providers can enable more cross-functional access to things like sales, purchasing, inventory, and supply chain information. 

For companies like US Foods, this holistic approach has allowed analysts to conduct comprehensive activity-based cost analyses, providing insights into the true costs of delivery to various customer segments. 

Part of this also comes down to innovation and a mindset shift, Coderre explained, as well as identifying areas that need to change or get up to speed. 

“Often, we lose our audience because we can’t deliver fast enough. To move faster, engage in script-level discussions with your team members to identify bottlenecks. Don’t assume efficiency; discover where analysts are waiting unnecessarily. Take excited people and pair them up with really knowledgeable people that’ll help to unlock and have conversations with your folks about what the challenges are in the business.” — Angie Coderre