New Way Now: Simbe's AI robotic vision tech improves retail sales and margin with Google Cloud
10Featured in this video: Morgan Denis, Chief of Staff, Simbe
Executive summary: Simbe, a retail technology company, uses Compute Engine, BigQuery, and Looker to provide unprecedented visibility into store intelligence and shelf conditions. Their autonomous robot, named Tally, checks inventory and identifies issues in retail stores. Simbe’s multimodality offering also includes fixed Tally Spot sensors mounted in stores, with Tally RFID deployed for softlines (items like apparel, home decor, and more). Simbe’s platform, which combines computer vision, fixed sensors, and RFID modalities, optimizes inventory management and pricing compliance so that retailers can enhance operational efficiency and deliver superior shopper experiences, ultimately driving up to 15x ROI. Simbe digitizes shelves for the largest number of retail brands in the world across nine countries, six sectors, and three continents.
Challenge: Retailers face significant challenges in the areas of inventory management, pricing accuracy, and item location, costing the industry 5.5% of revenue and 5% of margin annually. This pressure on the supply chain makes it difficult to ensure products are in stock, correctly priced, and in the right place, impacting shopper trust and revenue.
Solution: Simbe built its secure and scalable solutions on Google Cloud, using scalable Compute Engine virtual machines for real-time data processing from its Tally robots to provide immediate, actionable insights into what products need to be restocked. BigQuery and Looker analyze historical data and create predictive models to visualize shelf availability trends so customers can develop optimized pricing strategies. Security Command Center ensures 360-degree security insight and proactive risk patching, while Simbe uses Identity and Access Management features for granular, role-based access control, safeguarding the captured shelf data.
Results: The partnership with Google Cloud has yielded significant benefits, as Simbe's customers are seeing up to a 15x return on investment on their technology. Retailers achieve more than 98% on-shelf availability, and price and promotional accuracy typically improve by more than 90%. This efficiency allows up to 50 hours per store to be rededicated weekly to helping shoppers, leading to a greater than 2% annual sales lift for retailers. Simbe has also scaled its operations on demand to meet customer needs worldwide, and has sustained its growth in a secure manner, providing data much faster than ever before.
Key takeaways and highlights from Morgan Denis, Chief of Staff, Simbe:
→ "Safeguarding that data is very important to us as a company. With Google Security Command Center, we actually are in control and understand the risks and the opportunities that intruders could have so that we can proactively patch them."
→ "One of the important aspects for us is multimodality, making sure that shelf data can be captured from any of our sensors. We have our robot, but we also have the Tally spots, which is a fixed infrastructure that allows you to capture the shelf or specific shelves at a higher frequency. With the use of Google, we're able to use all of those multimodal signals and deliver unparalleled information to our customers."
→ "BigQuery's seamless integration within the broader Google ecosystem allows for fast, secure, and scalable operations."
→ "Our collaboration with Google Cloud is built on mutual trust, scalability, and a client-first mentality. It’s not just about building great products — it’s about exceeding our clients’ expectations and delivering value on a global scale."
Google Cloud products used: Compute Engine, BigQuery, Looker