Most retailers have more AI pilots than agents in production. The models usually work. What stops them is the data estate underneath, with invisible ownership and quality nobody has funded.
As a digital transformation partner to CIOs and CDOs at some of the world's largest retailers, we have taken those pilots into production. At Ashridge House we are hosting a session on the decisions that make that possible.
Think Tank: The Real Bottleneck Isn't AI. It's Data.
Day 2, Thursday 1 October, 10:50 AM GMT. Praveen Chandra, Business Head - Data, Analytics, Digital Marketing, ERP, and Data Science.
Ask around your own business who owns a given data set, whether it is clean enough to act on, and who approved exposing it downstream. The answers come back slower and vaguer than the roadmap assumes.
A closed-door leadership conversation rather than a product pitch. No reference architectures, no platform walkthroughs. Three questions on the table:
- Who in your organisation actually owns the decision to prioritise data work over the next AI use case, and do they have the authority to make it stick?
- Which AI use case does your team want to build but cannot, because nobody signed off on fixing the data first?
- If every retailer in the room compared honestly, where would the industry land?
What We Bring to the Room
1. Data quality and observability you can audit
BEAT™ automates data validation, profiling and testing in-sprint, and Nitrate™ adds pipeline observability, reconciliation and anomaly detection.
2. AI and ML that reach production
Personalisation, demand forecasting and merchandising across the full lifecycle, built on the unified customer profiles Cadmium™ assembles, with the MLOps and governance that keep a model running after the pilot signs off.
3. The platforms and pipelines underneath
CARBON™ generates the ingestion pipelines that move you off a legacy warehouse, and we modernise the data estates around it as an embedded extension of your team.
4. Product content at digital shelf scale
ContentHubGPT™ generates and governs product content, so the catalogue holds up when an answer engine has to quote it.
One Thing We Will Probably Say
Data debt is a funding decision before it is an engineering backlog. Until somebody holds the authority to say no to the next use case, it compounds.
Find Us at Ashridge House
Ashish Ranjan and Praveen Chandra are on site both days. Bring the part of your AI roadmap that is stuck, and we will be straight about what it takes.
Schedule a time with them. Email us at marketing.team@gspann.com.
Our Experts
Ashish Ranjan
VP & Head, EMEA
