In this episode of Retaili$tic, Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, is joined by Brad Bogolea, CEO and Co-Founder of store intelligence technology provider Simbe, to discuss the evolving landscape of in-store retailing. Focusing on the impact of AI (artificial intelligence), robotics and store intelligence, the conversation explores how retailers are rethinking their operations, the importance of visibility in store management and the rise of retail media networks. Uncover the benefits of technology adoption for both employees and customers, and understand the need for data-driven decision-making in the retail sector.
Takeaways
Chapters
00:00 This Week in Research: New Reports and Data
01:37 The Evolution of In-Store Retail Technology
03:24 The Impact of Technology on Retail Operations
07:22 Understanding Store Intelligence and Its Benefits
11:21 The Role of Robotics and AI in Retail
15:56 Connecting Data to Business Processes
18:28 Enhancing Employee Satisfaction and Customer Experience
20:05 The Importance of Visibility in Store Operations
22:51 Addressing Shrink and Inefficiencies in Retail
25:00 The Rise of Retail Media Networks
30:38 The Future of Retail Technology and AI
Read the latest annual study from Coresight Research and Simbe, published in June 2025, to dive into the dawn of new-age stores.
Welcome to Retaili$tic, the official podcast of Coresight Research for June 17th, 2025. This week, our CEO, Deborah Weinswig, expands the conventional definition of the supply chain in a riveting conversation with Brad Bogolea, CEO of Simbe. But before we dive into the details of the second annual report with Simbe, let's look at some of the other research publishing this week on coresight.com.
We'll be spotlighting luxury retailing, examining the performance and strategies of Kering and LVMH, putting the two companies head-to-head. We'll discuss the impacts of tariffs on the upcoming back-to-school and end-of-year holiday seasons in the U.S. We wrap up the first quarter of 2025 earnings season, providing detailed information and highlights on leading retailers and brand owners' recent performance and their forward-looking guidance.
Leveraging proprietary U.S. consumer survey findings, we'll preview the back-to-school shopping season. We'll dive into the use cases and value of AI in the beauty industry. Our weekly U.S. openings and closures tracker and weekly UK store openings and closures tracker, both publishing every Friday, report on the latest store closures, store openings, and bankruptcies. The three data points we're watching this week's spotlights key data points from our research. Look out for this series every Friday. You can find the last infographic which presents proprietary survey findings on consumer sentiment in the US and China on Coresight.com. Now let's throw it over to Deb and Brad.
Hello everyone, we're so excited to be here today with Brad from Simbe because we are talking about our second annual State of In-Store Retailing Report. So what's different this time? Well, now we have two years of data so we can see the change year on year, but we're also expanding to Europe. And so this entire market around in-store technologies is really growing and I think that retailers are really starting to think differently about how they invest, where they invest and why they invest. And right, this idea, Brad, around store intelligence technology is part of it.
So let's start at the beginning. Brad, tell us about you, tell us about Simbe and tell us why we're all here today.
Absolutely. Deb, thank you so much for having me on and again, all the work to collaborate on this exciting report. I'm Brad Bogolea, CEO and co-founder at Simbe. I founded Simbi about 10 years ago, really with the mission of digitizing physical stores. And our real goal today is building the intelligence and visibility layer into every store around the world. And what we mean by that is digitizing every shelf, every product, understanding every price tag where every product is located.
And how do you leverage this new data set to really evolve the operating model of these retailers? And so we've had the fortunate opportunity to do work with more than 40 of some of the largest retailers across the world. These include segments like grocery, mass, club, DIY, home improvement, pure play alcohol stores. We've had a front row seat to truly what's happening in these stores at a frequency and fidelity that's never been seen before. So Deb. Really excited for the conversation today and to mutually share some of the insights that we've been seeing across the industry.
Brad, what's been really interesting to us is what's happened in a fairly short period of time around technology adoption. think that shareholders are increasingly listening on earnings calls to see what's new in this area and they're really rewarding, right? With higher share prices, higher market caps. And so I believe that we're starting to see a real change in terms of who owns the technology and it's really starting from the CEO all the way on down. And so as you see some of this adoption kind of across the board, what surprised you the most?
Yes, to your point, Deb, think a lot of leadership teams and boards are waking up. You know, I recall us being in similar forums over the last several years where analysts within the retail industry really celebrated just predictable and so much of the same in the world of retail. If we look at where the most valuable companies on the planet sit today, it's really those investing heavily in technology and transformation. So if I look back over the last year, what I would say is we've seen such an increase in the number of retailers looking at actively investing in AI and automation, and particularly in areas like shelf intelligence. And what they're beginning to realize is helping them better address some of their big macro headwinds, right? Where are they losing revenue? Where are they losing margin? So we're just seeing this type of conversation come up a lot more.
As all of you should have the report in hand since the drops today, I personally thought one of the most interesting tables and insights were around talking to the retailers about the challenges that they face with in-store inefficiencies. And looking at it through a tech lens, I always thought that promotion execution errors were at the top, and I was surprised last year when that was down at seven. But I believe that a lot of the transparency around that maybe didn't exist.
I think with Simbe and others, that's really accelerated. So I thought it was really interesting that promotion execution errors had walked their way up to number one. The other area that was really interesting was, once again, this opaqueness previously around understanding individual stores and what was driving better performance. As you think about some of the challenges that retailers have faced and not only what do they think is the greatest opportunity versus what is the greatest opportunity.
Do you see that those are more closely aligning than they have in the past? And if so, what does that mean for you and Simbe?
Absolutely. I think we are seeing a deeper trend there. think as humans, Deb, we all have great intuition, but what's really important is having great objective data. And if I take the first point you mentioned just a moment ago around pricing and promotion, really for the first time in retailers history, they're able to measure their price accuracy in these types of environments very, very empirically.
And I think what was so unique of what both you found in the report and we see with many of our clients today is 80% of retailers are operating with a 5% price error rate. And you think about the missed opportunities, not only around consumer consumption, the liability around weights and measures. So what we're seeing is the gap closing between these historical systems and these execution gaps with this new level of visibility and folks really waking up to that firsthand.
One of the things I really liked about the report is having a very deep supply chain background. And I've always believed this was this idea that the shelf is a new supply chain frontline. I've always thought that. And I think that that really makes it much more tangible as people think about right decisions and pricing or replenishment, labor, e-commerce. And I also was finishing this idea of unified commerce, but we're seeing more and more retailers rethink their physical footprint around an e-commerce strategy. And so as we look at that.
Where's the greatest opportunities that you're seeing through a Simbe lens for retailers to improve store operations?
We believe it starts fundamentally with just having true visibility into that environment. So it benefits all facets across store operations. We were talking about price and promo a minute ago. No question that's a huge theme. Historically the biggest theme and some of the biggest opportunity remains around out of stocks and how do retailers optimize everything from backroom pools to labor optimization, the accountability they're driving around their direct to store delivery partners or any of their merchants. I would say as consumer expectations continue to increase as well as competitive pressure, this data is really becoming a necessity. And we as a company really believe that the smartest stores out there, the next generation stores are not only gonna be defined how they look in the customer experience, but really precisely understanding what's happening in real time at the shelf.
I couldn't agree with you more. And one of the things that I've always found interesting and as an analyst, right, you would ask retailers their in-stock levels and there were wildly different numbers and I couldn't really understand that. And honestly, the retailers I thought were doing the poorest job of on-shelf availability had the highest in-stock numbers according to themselves. And so it went back to some of these retailers, I think, who were and are underperforming to find in-stock is in the store, not necessarily on the shelf.
Yes.
And so if we think about the fact that only 20% of retailers have fully scaled store intelligence, what's holding them back? also, if you think about from a definition perspective, why are we seeing such differences?
Absolutely. would say there's a couple things there. I would say although only 20% have adopted this type of technology, I would say there's really strong intent on interest. So more than two thirds are actively piloting, exploring. I would say what's missing and separates the two thirds from the 20% is the 20% are the folks that have developed a deeper understanding of the true size of the prize.
And what this really means from cost savings, revenue standpoint, I would say the other variable we see is just around cultural alignment and prioritization. Dave, as you and I know, automation in AI is going to drive some of the deepest change really across any industry that we've ever seen in our history. And so those retailers that are building the deepest competitive advantage today are those that are really leaning in and see that this really provides the deep objective view to their store versus the piecemeal self-reported data they either had from store teams, their proxy on in-stock position that they were getting from online grocery. They really, for their first time, have a holistic understanding of what's happening in the environment and really able to measure the size of the prize. And with the size of the prize there, I would say what we're seeing is. This type of project or initiative moves up the stack very quickly once they get to that level of understanding.
Yeah, I think that understanding the size of the prize, also in some cases, understanding that there are solutions that go across the ecosystem and are not either kind of store staff or HQ. There can be different levels of interest, but to me, this one, everyone's aligned and going back to if your store is right from a supply chain perspective, that really allows everybody to align. I was just in Shenzhen this past week, so it's all about robotics. So I'm probably not very independent thinker at this moment on this because everything was about that. But where do you see robotics in physical store, right? Consumer facing. How do you think about it throughout supply chain? And how do you think about adoption rates? And why do they differ so much? And it's like four questions, but we'll do our best.
Yeah, I would certainly say we are seeing adoption rates further accelerating and the demand that we see in the market today is at an all time high. We've signed more new logo partnerships in the last 12 to 18 months than we have in our entire history. And what we're seeing here, Deb, is retailers make deliberate investments. And in the past, it was more tests and experiments. Certainly, we all get the benefit, I think, of the chat GPT moment that has opened everyone's eyes to really the opportunity of AI and how empowering it can be. I would say the other piece that's really helping with adoption is we're seeing the greatest amount of knowledge sharing across share groups with our particular client base.
And what's been exciting about this is it's not every retailer reinventing the wheel. We're starting to see best practice forums built around evaluating shelf intelligence vendors, best practices in deploying shelf intelligence, how to manage change management, what type of ROI and value case should you be looking for? And I would say the more the proven results that retail partners have been able to deliver on best in class OSA, best in class price execution, order online fulfillment rates, store team satisfaction, customer sat. I would say these have been some of the biggest needle movers for adoption, but certainly we're all riding the wave of what's happening with physical automation and physical AI, where the cost of sensor technology is going down drastically. The cost of compute is going down drastically.
Yeah, it's interesting. We adopted in our AI Council at the last meeting, we started to really lean into AI in the physical world because I do think it's easier, right? Especially if from a retail perspective, you're starting the physical world and moving to digital, it's much easier to understand. But I'll tell you, this year at CES, LIDAR, it was just on a different rung of the ladder. And I will hail to Jensen Huang at Nvidia where he's like, LIDAR is AI in the physical world. And with that, all of us, right? Like it was that moment where like your brain, I can't quite explain it. You're like, it just all makes sense now, right? It like literally opened up.
And so I have to tell you, I would not have expected this. I probably spent more time with John Deere at CES because right, they're talking about like, 360 and like, it was really interesting how they've done so much in LIDAR almost synonymously. So a lot of us kind of really leaned into it and were really well educated. So if we think about how LIDAR is really becoming much more commonplace or at least better understood, how important is that in the growth in Simbe specifically, but also robotics more generally and what's happening in a physical store?
So as it relates to LiDAR, let me take a step back. As we think about sensing technology that's applicable to retail, we see a myriad of technologies. LiDAR is one. 3D cameras, 2D cameras, inertial sensors, RFID sensors. What has been most interesting is just how powerful this sensing technology has garnered. And a lot of this is due to investments that has happened in everything from autonomous vehicles to the mobile smartphone, et cetera. So retailers have been able to gain the benefit of just the platformization that's come across the world. But the ability to create these digital twins through 3D camera technology, LIDAR, and these types of environments is really a game changer. We've never been able to visualize or recreate these environments in this way.
And as you know, other analysts in this space have really commented on 2025 really being the year of the robot, given the level of inflection we've seen around the deployments of this type of sensing technology. Also think that if we think about it from a retail perspective, because obviously there's many uses for robotics, going back to shareholders want retailers and brands to do something. It's much easier if it's visible. Yes. And they can also see the results very quickly.
Maybe you can elaborate on the speed with which results show up in top line and bottom line after retailers and brands are working with Simbe, because I think it's always this data to dollars that everyone really leans into.
There are a number of aspects there, Deb. I would say one of maybe the first components is AI and automation connecting the shelf to the store teams, to the head office, to the supply chain. creates these digital workflows that now work in real time that in the past historically had these manual processes. So that's kind of step one. And then with that real time instrumentation, we get to this world where we actually move from like exception management actually to orchestration.
And what's so exciting is once we get into these stores, the low hanging fruit is really obvious. It's we don't have these products on the shelf, but they're in the back room. So let's prioritize our fixed fill or backroom pull lists. Here are clearly areas where we have shelf to inventory mismatch. So where there's distortion, where there's shrink, this type of value can be realized very quickly. And in fact, typically within just our first weeks on the ground with stores, they have a pretty holistic understanding of where they sit. And in fact, some in-store environments, it's really the first traversal, our first mission that this type of technology steps through the store.
I would say traditionally from a pilot standpoint, we can see retailers reduce out of stocks about 60% in less than 50 days. Like this level of impact, reduce price errors 90% within that same time period or less. So real meaningful change can happen very quickly with these issues in store. And then so much of this becomes how do you best connect this data feed to all of your core business processes to ensure you're optimizing auto reordering, demand forecasting, your merchandising decisions, what you're doing on the digital side.
It's really interesting when I think about you just said is that seven years ago we're talking about the consumer being at the center when the retailer was still at the center. I believe we're moving into an age where the employees at the center and with what you just said right you're starting to give the employee almost more job satisfaction because they know that they can take care of customers.
And I would think that that would also decrease turnover at the employee level, which I think going back to the level of knowledge that these store associates have, I mean, it really makes a huge difference for the customer ultimately, but also right there in some ways also able to sense things that maybe newer employees can't. And if you can pair that up with best in class technology like Simbe, I think it makes a huge difference.
Yes, and one of the things we've seen there, Deb, we've had the fortunate opportunity to survey and do a lot of NPS type work across our client base. And we've shared some of this research with the industry over the last year, but nine out of 10 store managers don't actually want to operate their store without this technology after they experience it. And it becomes such a power tool to them in that way.
We also have corresponding consumer research that just demonstrates that during the period of this technology being onboarded, they can actually recognize changes within the store environment and the overall experience there. So automation and AI are sometimes viewed as scary or taboo topics to certain folks. But what we're finding in this scenario is it actually becomes such a power tool to the store team and massively elevates their experience. And that's something that's really rewarding, I think, to us both as a company and us together as an industry.
If you think about the fact that you decrease associate turnover, your store managers are happier because if they're selling more, right, usually their bonus is at least partially based on the performance of the store that they're managing. So you have a happier store, if you will, a better buzzing store, the customers can feel that. So it's kind of this omni win, right? The manager wins, associate wins, the customer wins. That is what we at CoreSight aim to drive for everything that we do. And your technology is really enabling that.
Yeah, it's a very privileged place for us to be in. We couldn't be more excited on the work that's happening across the industry.
If we lean into store ops, which I think is still, even in terms of how it's defined, I think is a bit opaque. I think the data from the report showed that only one in four retailers have full visibility into store operations. And so that lack of clarity can make it difficult to make decisions, right? Where do they spend more time? Where do they spend more money? Why do you think they've been so willing to not push harder to have greater visibility?
And obviously without it, kind of got both hands tied behind your back. What is it about 20, right? We're right in the midst of 2025. We believe similar to last year where the first half was about sales, the back half was about operations. Then we're going into this heavier operations focus because as somebody who started off my career as an accountant, there are things that you kind of need to true up as you go throughout the year. And so we're refocusing from a retailer store, even item level.
How do you think about this idea around visibility and the back half of 25 and what retailers and brands are really focusing on?
I think there are a couple of different pieces there, Deb. I would say first and foremost for those retailers that are not heavily investing in this yet today, I certainly put myself in their shoes. You know this well, Deb, but many of the large chains out there are evaluating their top 100 to 200 strategic projects or initiatives and what they're thinking about this year and the rest of this year to prioritize. So I certainly appreciate as they think about which strategic projects add the most value.
I think to move shelf intelligence up the stack for a number of those players, some of it is the education experience and seeing this type of technology work in their environment and see the true size of the prize. would say whether a retailer is focused on growth or efficiency, I think what's unique about automation AI and these types of solutions is it really provides you both. And that's where we've received interest from retailers that are on a rip, as well as retailers that are thinking about restructuring and turnaround. And those are some of really powerful ways that AI out in automation can help unlock here.
Think about the headliners or what was discussed on earnings calls in 2024, there was a lot around organized retail crime, shrink and whatnot. And I always wondered exactly how they were measuring it because being very involved in NRF Protect is a great conference and Lost Prevention Research Council, right? Like really leaning into this, I think that there are a lot of different points of view. And so if we think about inefficiencies in a store and we can put shrink, ORC, how can store intelligence reverse that?
One of the pieces we've seen, Deb, is store intelligence be so powerful to help a retailer get to root cause. The narrative that you and I have seen over the last year or two, particularly around shrink, and a lot of that was particularly projected at theft, quite frankly. This type of technology allows us to help get to true root cause. Did we actually see the product in store on shelf, and now is it not there? So is that attributed to it going out the front door?
These types of scenarios versus you may have overage damage and shortages, right? We sometimes forget the complexity of did the right product get picked at the warehouse? Did it get on the right pallet? Did it get on the right truck? Did it get dropped at the right store? Did it get placed in the right place in the back room? And you think about just the incredible complexity all of our incredible retail partners manage from a supply chain to get a product from the DC or the manufacturer actually to a shelf.
There are so many different steps there. And one of the pieces we've been able to do is just provide accountability and root cause on, Hey, we know that product was delivered on a truck. It didn't go door to floor last night. Why isn't it up there? And so let's figure that out. Or it was on shelf, but now it's no longer getting to root cause of those pieces has really helped retailers distill what goes in each of these buckets? How much of this is an addressable out of stock that a store team needs to take action on? Or was this overage shortages? Was this true theft? So we're able to get to far more empirical data than I would say most retailers have been able to in the past.
So I was trying to wait, but I just can't wait anymore. I've been on my mind throughout our whole call today is retail media has truly evolved in a very different way than I would have expected, right? For so many retailers and brands to have their own retail media networks. I thought we'd have about 10. Obviously I was off by a significant order of magnitude, like 40X. And so if we think about the importance of retail media, what's on shelf, at what time,
We've had several retailers who have expressed frustration in the data and for the brands to be on the same page that they are that the data they're all looking at is the same. How does Simbe come into play there? Because to me, it's really the one true blueprint. back to what you just said, right? It's a true blueprint of what's happening at what point in time, right? Was a product on shelf? Was it available? Was it in a different place? And retail media is so important now, I'm probably getting even more so because it allows retailers and brands to invest back into stores and operations and whatnot in terms of just the model. You can dig into that and there's probably questions I haven't even asked you that I'd love for you to answer as well.
On the retailer in brand side, I would say one of the really exciting outcomes just around value realization and aligning the value chain has been is the retailer gets to a point where they have reasonably operationalized this data themselves. The first place we see them go next is how can they leverage this data set with a broader ecosystem?
And so we've seen a number of different buckets, first and foremost, with their manufacturers and we put them in two buckets. I would say those manufacturers that deliver direct to store, if you're talking about groceries. So we have a number of retail partners that share our data to help their direct to store delivery partners optimize truck rolls, know what they need to bring to the store before they even show up. And you recognize the complexity of when you sell a 16 ounce bottle of Pepsi, where did it actually come from in the store? How many different locations. And so we have great location level analytics that are happening in those types of buckets.
We see our data being highly leveraged in category level conversations between the retailer and brand. As you think about mutual space optimization, as it relates to retail media, this has been a massive increase in category. And I think you said it best, but no brand is going to love to pay for a benefit and either not have the product present for either their own reason or the retailer's reason.
So we've seen this technology as a way to provide greater transparency. And it's even garnered the likes of the number of inquiries we get from the Googles and Facebooks of the world because advertising is becoming so hyper local. You don't want to push customers into these local environments and not know that the product is on shelf. So we're seeing these connection points really evolve.
And I would say one of the other buckets a lot of work is happening in is with the major online grocery players. And by having up-to-date product availability and real-time product location information, you can send a third party in store and pick a product much faster because you have a map. You know it's there. Are you routing them to the right place? So we see all of these advanced use cases and what that really means for us is just the retailer and the rest of the value chain can extract even more opportunity from this type of technology.
Do you think it allows the retailers to have greater confidence in localizing product? Because we've typically heard even from the largest grocers, discounters, clubs, et cetera, about a 4 % localization rate. I always personally thought H10 was probably more appropriate, but I do think there was some fear in that. Do you see them leaning into greater localization after utilizing the technology? Or what are some of the changes you start to see or that they've shared with you.
We see deep interest of retailers wanting to look at this data from a local perspective. Every store we're in is a little bit of a snowflake and we've seen lots of interesting examples. We've seen snow shovels end up in stores that are close to the beach that have maybe never seen snow. We've seen operations or facility leaders or merchant leaders log into these tools and see that perhaps a specific seasonal initiative is not being initiated the way that they expected or a new shelving fixture wasn't set up, et cetera. Having this real-time virtual twin where any corporate stakeholder or any regional stakeholder attached to that specific store can actually log in at any moment and understand what's happening and physically browse that store has been a game changer.
And what's so interesting is obviously to improve our applications, we're trying to understand user behavior, which features are most impactful in our solution. But the level of engagement we see in our tools, not only from the store manager to as high in some of these orgs as this COO of a publicly traded retailer, logging in and looking at this data, it's just really exciting.
I always ask who's your client at the client. And I, from recent conversations, I would say in the last quarter, where this decision lies has seemed to move more into COO because if you think about it, you've got so many parts of the organization that you can touch and number of problems that you're solving. I had, my gosh, I'm going to say, I believe it. I it was like a decade ago. We started doing a lot at Coresight on the computer vision side and helping to explain what it was. And it just felt like we were slogging through.
Then you finally had RFID. We're not having those huge debates. Part of it is cost of readers and we don't need readers like we used to, et cetera. And then this whole thing around fixed sensors. I mean, Simbe really kind of brings all that together. And I think individually there's been interest, but now having it kind of all in one wrapper, that's been critical. I I look at Simbe as more than just robotics company, way more, but how do you describe that? I guess almost as orchestration layer, bringing everything together. And if you go back to your original vision almost a decade ago, did you think that you'd be able to get to where you are eventually or is it beyond what you thought at the beginning of the journey?
Back over the last decade, we'd always wanted to have a robot in every store. And I think we knew that the power of this data, I think to be frank, we probably underestimated the true power. Where our business has evolved today, this isn't just about robots, although robots, particularly for medium to large format stores have proven to be the most scalable, accurate, cost-effective means to get high fidelity data out of these environments, but we're seeing really the future is multimodal or multisensory. So at Simbe and our robots, we combined computer vision and RFID.
We've also created fixed cameras for select scenarios. Those could be scenarios where you have a product that turns real fast during the day, rotisserie chicken, the pizza counter, these types of scenarios or scenarios where you have a lot of theft. So I would say multimodal has been a big component.
I would say the other big change over the last couple of years is moved not only from just like the automation and insight, but really driving this collective intelligence on what's happening. We've certainly evolved from this world of just sharing exceptions and giving basic recommendations to a retailer to helping to evolve their full operating model. I would say those would be some of the biggest changes.
Certainly those benefits have been enabled by what's happening in the world of GPUs and algorithms in that, but we're excited about where the future is going here.
How does Edge impact you?
We've always developed a solution that could operate in store environments. Store environments aren't deeply bandwidth constrained, right? They have connectivity, Instacart needs to get online, the store team needs to get online. But Edge presents an interesting opportunity, especially at the pace of which GPUs are being developed, because it allows you to do more on the Edge than in the cloud. And what that often means is that increases your ability to provide results faster.
You're not waiting for the latency on the back end. You're also reducing the cloud cost for both the vendor and the retailer. So that's how Edge is being deployed today. Although if you're talking about robots or fixed cameras, you do have to be mindful that in either of these scenarios, these devices may be battery backed. So the amount of Edge compute has to be properly calibrated. But there are more and more opportunities there. And Simbe has always had a hybrid processing model where we can dial up the amount we want to put in the cloud or push more to the edge depending on the environment and the needs.
Yeah, I was just thinking about ROI. What advice do you have for companies that are just at the very beginning of their journey and what questions should they be asking themselves as they're trying to make some of these decisions?
I would say from an advice standpoint, maybe first and foremost, we talked about intuition versus data earlier. It's not a huge lift to do a project like this. In fact, much technology like ours can operate with very limited input from a retail IT team. It's very light lift. think starting with the data and getting the true current state of execution across your stores. And I'm not talking about putting this in your headquarters store, but getting a real sample geographic mix, operational execution mix, volume or format mix, and get a relative sense of, what does this data say versus the data that your store teams provide or what your online grocery or omni-channel find rate says? And in worse, there's differences. I would say that's one.
I would say two, the strategic alignment across the business. To your point, in the early days, a lot of our projects were IT, CIO, CTO type led. More or less everything today is COO SVP of stores, SVP of operations led, but it's super cross-functional. So having the right alignment, ensuring once people in ops, merchandise, finance facilities, see this data and see the opportunity, you start to build real momentum.
And I would say in today, given the narrative that's happening, if whatever forum you're in, Rela, NRF, your own board, there's so much happening about automation and AI. Those executive stakeholders that have provided early visibility of these types of projects to that level, or we've actually encouraged the opportunity for us to brief these types of stakeholders, has really changed the acceleration curve of the adoption of this type of tech. So those are just a couple points as more folks look into this type of technology.
You spoke earlier in our conversation around knowledge sharing. What forms does Simbe put together or host for retailers to talk to each other about their pain points, how to solve them, maybe how to learn from somebody who started earlier, and this power of community we see evolving very quickly and becoming even more important to the industry. How are you helping to drive some of these sharing moments?
One of the things, Deb, that's really impressed me about this industry since I stepped into it more than a decade ago was just the level of knowledge that happens across these share groups, whether formal or informal. So our goal has really been to continue to build on those types of practices that has always existed. In the early days, any interested customer, prospective customer, we would often connect with our existing customers.
Today, we're doing a lot more formalization around a true customer advisory board. In addition, we are omnipresent in forums like FMI, NRAF, RELA, and these types of areas where we encourage vendor agnostic IT best practice dialogue on what does it mean to evaluate this tech? What should be your success criteria? What are the IT integration requirements? What should be the business case? The ROI, what are the business models associated with them? So I would say we've been driving a lot ourselves as a company independently, but we've continued to lean on the incredible organizations, both you, I, and others are internally involved across the industry to leverage their connectivity. But this is an area where I do encourage those that are evaluating these types of decisions to either talk to us or talk to others that have gone through it, because there's certainly opportunities to learn and accelerate the time to value so not everyone's reinventing the wheel.
Sadly, I feel like it's been like two minutes, but it's been longer. so our time must come to a close, unfortunately. But maybe, Brad, once again, we're at this perfect point midway through 25. And maybe you can talk about your vision for the rest of this year into next. And do you have any news to share with us as well?
Yes, I see Deb, the continued build on the world of retail becoming more of an AI first market or AI first economy. So I really love just the level of investments we're seeing across the industry from GPT like prompts to help associates to the way the industry is using generative AI. So there's certainly a huge wave here. As we talked earlier, those retailers that are in growth mode or those retailers that may be in recovery mode, we're seeing fairly equal interest for AI and automation being a differentiator, our vision is for this type of technology to really be ubiquitous in every store on the planet.
And I think for us, just the momentum that we've continued to see in the space over the last 12 to 18 months, particularly I would say, Deb, with a lot of tier one players. And I would say tier one players that have maybe spent the last couple of years, maybe, testing, but doing a bit of wait and see and seeing what others are doing. We're seeing this type of dialogue go clear up to the board level with some of the largest players in the US as well as internationally.
We mentioned Europe at the beginning of the call and the fact that many European retailers were also surveyed here. We've signed a number of deals within that market. And in fact, although the number of chain wide expansions maybe is not quite as large as what's happening in the US. There is a lot of activity happening in that market and we certainly see similar opportunity across the standard retail segments there as well. So we couldn't be more excited about what's ahead.
And I think what's interesting, right, is that in an inflationary environment, I do think retailers and brands are trying to rethink everything in supply chains so that they can either keep costs of parity or even lower them. And really, I think with our whole conversation today, we can see that as not a wish or a maybe we can see that kind of actualizing as well. And I think that to me is what's so exciting is that ultimately from retailers trying to think forward in their operations that ultimately it comes back to a better experience for store associates, store manager, and ultimately the consumer and not just on shelf availability, but also potentially in terms of lower prices. So I think what you've built is amazing and I can't wait to see what's ahead. Thank you so much for joining us, Brad. This was such a wonderful conversation and we wish you much success.
Thank you, Deb, and look forward to everyone's opportunity for taking a look at the report. Thank you for your time today.
Thanks.
Thanks, Debra. You can access your free copy of the report on Coresight.com. While you're there, check out the catalog of over 7,000 reports and data resources available to our subscribers. You can also sign up for email highlights of the research we publish every day. If you can join us in Manhattan next week, you can also register for our conference, Next Gen Retail, on Monday, June 23rd. The conference will focus on AI, the evolving consumer, and the spaces where commerce comes to life.
there. Have a wonderful day!