The Entrepreneurs' Odyssey: Infilect's success story as a global force in retail intelligence for FMCG Brands Worldwide

Based in Bangalore, India & with offices in the US and Canada, Infilect Inc. is among the pioneers that brought innovation to the Consumer Packaged Goods industry using Image Recognition technology. Global CPG iIndustry has been struggling to gather real-time and accurate retail execution data from physical stores and with the expanse of geography across which the stores are established, it only adds to the size of the problem. This problem was identified by two colleagues & friends, Vijay Gabale and Anand Prabhu Subramanian, the brains and the co-founders of Infilect Inc.

Infilect is a leader in advanced retail visual intelligence that has proven to accelerate per-store sales of leading FMCG brands by over 5%. With their flagship product, InfiViz, FMCG companies can now reliably and easily gather retail execution data by simply digitizing their manual audit process. This helps them assess their on-shelf product performance, measure Share-of-Shelf, monitor planogram and visibility standards in real-time, like never before. Before we delve more deeply into the brainchild of Vijay & Anand and the wonders it can do, let us quickly familiarize ourselves with the humans that established this.

Infilect's CTO, Vijay, a Ph.D. in Wireless Platform and AI systems from IIT Bombay, combines his expertise in AI and product development with experience from IBM Research. He holds six patents and 15 research publications. CEO Anand, with over 15 years of experience in research and product-building, has contributed significantly to Data Analytics, Machine Learning, and AI during his tenure at IBM Research and Nokia Bell Labs (USA)..

Anand and Vijay bring together the right and left cerebral capacities in just the right stoichiometry that is critical to building intelligent AI capabilities that solve FMCG problems realtime. The CPG market terrain still sees some challenging topography from time consuming manual store audits to drive effective in-store retail execution at thousands of stores. The CPG industry faces the challenge of maintaining optimal stock levels on shelves and strategically positioning promotional materials. When there is a lack of proper measurement of on-shelf stock levels, shelf metrics, and compliance scores in every store, it creates a blind spot that results in lost sales and unsatisfactory outcomes on trade spends.

“In the CPG landscape where each and every player is vying for in-store customer attention, companies must continuously innovate and leverage cutting-edge technologies to remain competitive. The use of image recognition technology has facilitated CPG businesses to gain insights into product displays on the shelf, enhance their marketing strategies, and improve their product stocking. While a lot has been discovered, a lot remains to be explored.”
Says Anand Prabhu, CEO of Infilect Inc.

Top FMCG brands worldwide use Infilect’s Image Recognition powered solution to improve their retail execution implementation and audit processes. Here are a few ways Infilect is using Image recognition and AI to achieve per-store growth at scale for FMCG brands worldwide

Realtime data analytics: Image recognition technology can help CPG companies gather more accurate and detailed data about on-shelf product stock, category assortment, compliance with trade promotions, and inventory management and real time.

Improve OSA: CPG companies with the help of extended facilities of Image Recognition can manage the inventory in real time, detect product substitution, and automate the process of monitoring and restocking of their products on the store, thereby, ensuring a holistic on-shelf availability.

Save Man Hours on Store Audits: Image Recognition has brought “Audits in a click” to reality. CPG companies can now rely on Image Recognition powered store audits to facilitate their merchandisers with more accurate information in a fraction of time. This not only filters the degree of purity of data but also saves millions of man hours.

Better Control: With real-time access to the ongoings inside the store, CPG companies have better visibility and control over the entirety of the process. This eliminates the risk of issues popping up from the hindsight and also better prepares for unfavorable conditions.

Improved supply chain management: By using image recognition technology, the stakeholders get better visibility into the product pipeline throughout the supply chain. Furthermore, CPG companies can improve on-shelf and in-store inventory, assortment planning, and reduce waste.

Increased efficiency: Image recognition technology can automate many of the tasks that are currently performed manually in the CPG industry, such as product placement, product stock, and merchandising processes. This can increase efficiency and reduce costs.

“Having witnessed the progress of AI from early 2010 to today, it is inevitable that whenever there is an advancement in technology, there is a layer of excitement that comes with it. However, moving beyond the golden span of attention and genuinely conquering the market necessitates a robust product-led technology basis.” Vijay Gabale, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Infilect Inc.