Retail Insight Launches AI Analytics Platform That Turns Retail Questions into Actions

Retail Insight, the AI-powered retail operations platform trusted by the world's leading retailers, today announced the launch of DecisionInsight, a new part of its AI-powered retail operations platform that lets retail teams ask a question of their operational data in plain language and get to the cause and the fix in minutes.

DecisionInsight is an on-demand AI analytics platform for retail: one place where anyone in a retailer can find insight rooted in the facts of their own operation. Users ask questions in everyday language and get back a written answer, with the numbers behind it visualised in charts that make the story clear at a glance, and a view on what to do next.

It exists because the questions retailers need answered have outpaced the reporting built to answer them. Every function now wants operational answers the same day, customised exactly to them. A report designed to a weekly rhythm was never going to answer something that only occurred to someone this morning, and retail moves faster than that. An experienced senior analyst can spend up to four hours investigating a single performance question whereas DecisionInsight can surface the answer and its drivers in minutes, giving teams time to act before the opportunity is lost.

The strength of the platform comes from what sits underneath it, where DecisionInsight brings together three things: the retailer's own operational data and the ontology that gives it meaning, the datasets and domain expertise Retail Insight has built over two decades in retail, and the most capable AI models available today. Each of those is valuable in its own right, but it is the combination that makes the difference, with the AI bringing the speed, the ontology meaning the platform reads the business the way the business defines itself, and two decades in retail turning a fast answer into a relevant, accurate and actionable one.

In practice that means bringing together core operational retail data, spanning sales, deliveries, promotions, on-shelf availability, inventory, waste and markdowns, labour, forecasting, weather and supplier performance, and letting anyone question all of it without needing to know where any of it lives or how to build the analysis. It does not stop at what happened either, because the platform will identify the root cause of a problem and recommend the next best actions to take.

"Retailers have no shortage of data. The difficulty has always been getting to answers quickly enough to act on them," said Alex Considine Tong, Chief Product Officer at Retail Insight. "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. Very few companies can bring the context and the technology to the same problem, and twenty years in retail technology and data is what lets us do it."

DecisionInsight’s context comes from a semantic model that understands the retailer's own business, and it is the reason every answer can show its working: users can follow the reasoning as the platform goes, see what is established fact and what has been inferred, and trace any figure back to the analysis that produced it. Answers also arrive framed for whoever is asking, with purpose-built agents for category owners, senior leadership, supply chain, store operations leads and store managers, none of which leave the user to work out for themselves what to do about it.

Once a team trusts an answer, the platform can act on it, running the analysis to a schedule and sending it out automatically to the people who need to see it, whether that is a category team receiving a weekly read on their own performance or a supplier receiving a performance scorecard, so the work of chasing down an issue and getting it in front of the right person happens without anyone having to remember to do it.

"What excites us is how ordinary this makes it feel," said Considine Tong. "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. That is a very different way of working with retail data, and it allows retailers' analytics teams to operate where they belong, on the problems only they can solve."

DecisionInsight is available as a web application, as a mobile app, and as an integration for retailers running their own AI agents, who can connect it through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and have it answer questions from inside the tools their teams already use.

DecisionInsight is live with major retailers globally and with 20 suppliers across Europe. It is part of Retail Insight's continued investment in its AI-powered retail operations platform, which today processes 15% of the world's grocery data across more than 68,000 stores.