ThryveAI, a Mi9 Retail (Mi9) brand providing the next generation of digital commerce for grocers, announced today it has partnered with taste intelligence company, Halla, to integrate grocery-specific artificial intelligence into the ThryveAI digital commerce platform. Halla provides the first and only real-time product recommendation and personalization engine designed exclusively for grocery. The accuracy of Halla’s real-time recommendations create a seamless and convenient shopping experience for consumers, while grocery retailers gain a lift in basket size, customer retention and brand loyalty.
ThryveAI was designed to bring Mi9’s leading grocery clientele enterprise-scale merchandise and e-commerce solutions tailored to the specific needs of grocery. An approach that will save time and resources. In fact, according to Gartner, by 2023, 85% of AI solutions sold by vendors will focus on concrete domains and industry verticals.1
“We developed ThryveAI on a cloud-native, API-first architecture that allows us to quickly and efficiently integrate third-party technologies like Halla,” said Neil Moses, Mi9 Retail CEO. “We believe that AI-driven personalization will transform online grocery and drive adoption to consistently higher levels.”
AI custom-tailored to the grocery vertical offers retailers the ability to deeply personalize online shopping experience. Instead of compelling shoppers to wade through tens of thousands of possible choices, the new ThryveAI platform will conveniently display the items best-suited to each customer based on shopping history, dietary preferences, current shopping cart selections and more.
Halla’s personalization is multi-modal artificial intelligence that “understands” the grocery space and how humans relate to food. Halla’s algorithm is trained on data from more than 800,000 food items, 125,000 ingredients, 17 million recipes and 30,000 content, context and behavioral attributes. Not only can it accurately predict the items, brands, and quantities that a customer is looking for, it can proactively recommend choices that match customer dietary preferences and lifestyle choices.
“Halla’s Taste Intelligence engine makes smart recommendations and encourages food discovery by understanding the customers’ individual taste preferences and how they will actually use each food item,” said Spencer Price, CEO and co-founder of Halla. “This provides a far superior experience to making customers update their preferences each time they visit a store online. We’re thrilled to be partner with ThryveAI to offer their grocery clients an easy and effective personalization solution.”
The first joint implementation is currently underway with a leading North American grocery chain with more than 150 locations. ThryveAI will continue to roll out this service to its entire client base over the next 12 months.
Gartner, What Is Artificial Intelligence? Seeing Through the Hype and Focusing on Business Value, Erick Brethenoux, 17 July 2020
