Smart & Final is rolling out Hypersonix's AI-driven analytics platform to support the company's enterprise analytics and digital transformation initiatives. The two companies started working together sixty days ago on a successful pilot program. With this announcement, Smart & Final officially joins a handful of early adopters in the grocery and consumer-commerce industries turning to the innovative company to help navigate the post-COVID-19 market. "Hypersonix is a key ingredient in leveraging actionable analytics that can be operationalized by our business teams as part of our on-going digital transformation," said Ed Wong, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Smart & Final. "We established a great innovation-centric collaboration with Hypersonix where we are finding new ways to address our needs in key strategic areas for our business."

Intel Capital Leads $11.5M in Series A Funding for Hypersonix, an AI-Driven Autonomous Analytics Platform Founded by Former Executives from SAP, PayPal, IBM As reported today in the Wall Street Journal, Hypersonix has received $11.5M in Series A funding led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investors. Hypersonix was founded by successful serial entrepreneur and former SAP executive Prem Kiran, and is led by an impressive co-founding team, including Rama Rao, former MIT research faculty member for advanced analytics, as well as former PayPal and Intuit data executive, and Todd Michaud, a former IBM executive and former president at Retalix. Hypersonix is an autonomous analytics and decisioning platform that is transforming consumer commerce data with artificial intelligence and automation. Amazon Lab126 is among its early customers. The funding comes at a time when IDC predicts worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics (BDA) solutions to reach $274.3B by 2022.

A next generation AI-Analytics decisioning solution should be able to tell retailers precisely how their business is doing across various departments and metrics far better than traditional business intelligence solutions can do. More importantly, the AI platform can explain why something happened (causation), and what you should do about it. Traditional business intelligence can't do this! What are examples of what can be done better with predictive and prescriptive AI-analytics capabilities? AI Demand Forecasting can provide highly accurate day-of-week and time-of-day forecasting at an item/store level.

We hear a ton nowadays about "Data Proficiency," however hardly anyone stops to consider what the term truly implies. When information is seen as the backbone of associations, it's important that organizations help their employees utilize information appropriately. Spending on enormous information and analytics is expected to overshadow $200 billion by mid 2020, up from $150 billion a year ago, as indicated by IDC. To take full advantage of these speculations, organizations must instruct their representatives to utilize information appropriately. So what is Data Proficiency?