“ BEES is a fantastic use case for us to become a reference , not only in Analytics , but also in Digital Transformation solutions .”
DANIELA SANTANA GRIECCO DATA & ANALYTICS DIRECTOR , NTT DATA
“ Using image recognition , ensures the retailers are presenting the products in the correct way to maximize sales .”
Jean Brant from Microsoft says " by using Azure Custom Vision , a cognitive service from our platform , it was possible to establish an image recognition solution adaptable to the different needs of any region of the world which greatly facilitates the process of scaling the solution to other countries .”
Ricardo Padula says he cannot sing the praises of NTT and Microsoft enough in how they helped deliver this project .
“ I ’ m not a technical person but working with Carlos and the rest of the team enabled us to use Optical Character Recognition ( OCR ) to identify not only prices but a whole host of elements which need to be right to maximize sales ,” he says . “ It may sound simple , but no one ever did this in the past . We struggled in the past for more than five years trying to recognise images , but we have never had success before . We even thought we ’ d have to employ the CIA or the FBI to achieve this .”
“ Now , with NTT and Microsoft we have a huge amount of data collected from the field to do thousands of pieces of analysis to really add value to the customer and retailer experience . “
“ Projects like this are perfect for highlighting the real possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in transforming our customers ' businesses . AI is not just a technological hype that one day will pass like many others , AI is an extremely powerful tool to deliver better experiences to our customers , be more efficient internally and consequently more competitive . ABInbev gives us an excellent example of how we should be disruptive , using the best that technology has to offer .“ says Evandro Armelin , Head of Data & Analytics Latam from NTT Data .
The synergy between the three groups was key in ensuring the project was executed correctly and the culture of the Ab-InBev sales teams and its retailers was fully understood to ensure a successful implementation .
Frederico De Marchi from Microsoft explains : “ We immediately had a connection , a cultural match , when Ricardo introduced our team and gave us the Bees Force challenge . It is a good example of how we apply our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more . We say we don ' t want to be cool , we want to make our customers cool .’ An appropriate choice of words given cold beer served from a cooler is at the heart of this project .” aimagazine . com 41