Retail technology company Retail Insight has launched an AI-powered analytics platform designed to help retail teams identify the causes of operational issues and determine corrective action in minutes.
DecisionInsight allows users to question their operational data in plain language and receive written answers supported by charts and analysis, without needing specialist data or analytics skills.
The company said the new platform addresses the growing gap between the speed at which retailers need answers and the slower reporting cycles of traditional analytics.
An experienced senior analyst can spend up to four hours investigating a single performance question, according to Retail Insight, while DecisionInsight is designed to surface the answer and its underlying drivers within minutes.
The platform brings together retailers’ operational data across areas including sales, deliveries, promotions, on-shelf availability, inventory, waste and markdowns, labour, forecasting, weather and supplier performance.
It can go beyond identifying what has happened to determine the potential root cause of a problem and recommend next steps.
Alex Considine Tong, chief product officer at Retail Insight, said retailers had “no shortage of data” but struggled to obtain answers quickly enough to act on it.
“AI can analyse vast volumes of information at extraordinary speed, but without context and a deep understanding of that data, it can just as easily lead you to the wrong conclusion,” she said.
Retail Insight said DecisionInsight combines a retailer’s own operational data and semantic model with datasets and retail expertise developed by the company over two decades, alongside AI models.
The semantic model is designed to understand how an individual retailer defines its business, allowing users to trace figures back to the analysis behind an answer and distinguish established facts from inferred conclusions.
The system also provides purpose-built agents for different retail roles, including category teams, senior leadership, supply chain and store operations, as well as store managers.
Once an analysis is trusted, retailers can schedule it and automatically distribute the resulting insight to relevant teams or suppliers. This could include a weekly performance report for a category team or a supplier scorecard, the company said.
“What excites us is how ordinary this makes it feel,” Considine Tong said. “A store manager, a category owner and a director can all ask the same question in their own words and get an answer they can act on before the day is out.”
DecisionInsight is available as a web application and mobile app, while retailers running their own AI agents can connect to the platform through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
The platform is already live with major retailers globally and 20 suppliers across Europe, according to Retail Insight.
The launch forms part of the company’s wider investment in its AI-powered retail operations platform, which it says currently processes 15 per cent of the world’s grocery data across more than 68,000 stores.