Breaking Free of Comps (AI's Real Gift to Retailers)
Every Monday, retail leaders from banking to beverages, fashion to fast food ask the same question: "How did we go versus last year?" Comparing sales to the equivalent week last year has become the target, the measure of performance, and a brutal trap.
Weekly comps lock businesses into strained and predictable cycles. Annual promotions become sacrosanct, budgets are burned through, competitors set their watches by your discounts, and the calendar is quickly overloaded with tactics that feel impossible to remove.
It doesn’t stop there. The prevalence of these numbers in data-hungry organisations means that ‘comps’ grow beyond their status to take over whole systems. As the adage says, “Where the focus goes, the energy flows”, and with the immediacy and judgment in those weekly performance numbers, they become that focal point. They grow beyond their original purpose into a law unto themselves and a quasi-management system for everything from boardroom conversations to team bonuses.
AI gives organisations metrics that look forward, not back
Modern AI models don't just crunch your sales history. They don’t rely on the 10-20% of data that is structured, residing in traditional databases, spreadsheets, and data warehouses (e.g., transaction records, neatly categorised customer information). They access and feed to the organisation the messy, insight-rich 80% to 90% of unstructured data it has been craving.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) calculates customer Sentiment from millions of reviews, providing a live measure of momentum. Computer Vision analyses camera feeds to see how customers move around your stores.
This level of insight previously lived only as intuition in the heads of 20-year store managers. With deep learning, the divide between the back office spreadsheet and frontline knowledge evaporates, giving rise to disarmingly accurate predictive models. It means layers of data creating new metrics that lay out precisely what your sales will be, from which segments, in different scenarios.
When your forecast of what is possible and how you can achieve it is mapped out so clearly, leaders have a platform to make bold, forward-thinking choices that make those one-dimensional weekly sales comp numbers almost academic.
It's a wonderful time to be in retail
With the accessibility of modern AI resources we can free ourselves from the shackles of comps. We can look forward instead of backward. We can build plans around a genuine market opportunity, not defending last year's numbers. Annual calendar and allocation of spend become purposeful, not predictable.
So, if you are tired of looking backward, let’s talk about how AI can help you experience the impact of building a strategy that looks forward.
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