The Perfect Store advantage: How AI-powered innovation is transforming CPG brands

Many of today’s leading CPG organizations struggle to determine how their brand is represented across different retailers, channels and markets. Between new product launches, ever-expanding catalogues of SKUs, seasonal promotions and more, tracking real-time product inventory and execution at the retail level can be a daunting task. In many cases, out of stocks or subpar execution can lead to lost revenue and deteriorating brand equity for brands – especially today, as consumers place a high priority on in-store product availability and promotion.

In this ever-changing marketplace, CPG brands require new and innovative solutions to keep pace with shifting consumer demand. With the introduction of cutting-edge AI and ML technologies, CPG brands now have the power to transform their shelf tracking, display execution and business insights through an innovation called Perfect Store.

The Perfect Store Solution

Perfect Store is a next-generation visual shelf recognition solution that provides today’s leading CPG organizations with accurate, seamless and intuitive shelf and retail information. By leveraging the latest technologies such as advanced data processing and AI, CPG brands can monitor critical KPIs, including:

• Out-of-stocks to prevent lost sales and improve replenishment strategies
• Share of Visual Inventory (SOVI) analysis to optimize brand visibility and shelf placement
• Price compliance monitoring to ensure consistency and adherence to promotional pricing
• Display execution to optimize spend on promotional materials and drive sales lift

Perfect Store modernizes merchandising and execution to deliver immediate cost savings, helping CPGs maintain a long-term competitive advantage over their competitors.

How Perfect Store fits your business: Best practices, challenges and opportunities:

Perfect Store serves as the gold standard for CPG brands aiming to enhance a variety of KPIs, including shelf presentation, assortment compliance, product availability, and display execution. Traditional store audits and manual photo-based tracking methods often fail to deliver real-time insights, making it difficult to address in-store challenges effectively. By replacing these traditional approaches with next-gen AI-powered video recognition, Perfect Store offers a number of key benefits, including:

• Automated, real-time shelf scanning to minimize out-of-stock issues.
• Immediate compliance verification to ensure product placement aligns with strategy.
• Real-time adjustments to maximize sales.
• Advanced analytics and predictive insights to drive better merchandising decisions.

Optimizing trade promotions with Perfect Store technology

Beyond inventory tracking, Perfect Store solutions significantly enhance trade promotions by providing real-time insights into promotional effectiveness. Many large CPG companies struggle to measure the ROI of their trade promotions, leading to inefficiencies such as:

• Weakened brand equity due to inconsistent execution
• Assortment inefficiency caused by inaccurate ordering processes
• Reduced profitability from ineffective promotional strategies

Perfect Store technology can also be integrated into multiple data sources and AI-driven analytics to provide granular insights into:

• Shopper demographics and outlet segmentation for targeted marketing.
• Trade promotion effectiveness analysis to refine future campaigns.
• Retail execution performance tracking to ensure compliance with promotional agreements.

By harnessing these AI-powered insights, CPG brands can drive higher ROI on trade promotions and improve overall brand performance at the retail level.

Empowering sales teams with AI-driven mobile applications

Beyond empowering CPG brands, retailers can also utilize Perfect Store to help elevate their user experience by offering sales representatives and merchandisers a cutting-edge mobile application tailored to fit their needs. These next-generation tools offer:

• Tailored reports and real-time KPIs to guide decision-making at the shelf.
• Offline functionality for uninterrupted use in low-connectivity environments.
• AR-enhanced visualizations that provide a digital twin of the shelf for instant analysis.

As consumers shop, Smart Store AI continuously analyzes key metrics, adjusting KPIs in real time. These insights enable retailers and manufacturers to make data-backed decisions on shelf arrangements, promotional execution, and restocking priorities. Advanced historical visit tracking ensures that each store visit builds upon previous insights, fostering improved consistency and efficiency in merchandising execution.

Meanwhile, as consumers continue shopping, the shelf analysis engine silently processes key metrics and KPIs in real time—and still entirely offline—calculating KPI updates continuously and on the fly. Further integrated features enable sales reps to manage shelving tasks on an organized agenda that even shows historical visit information, ensuring consistent execution and streamlined processes from one store visit to the next.

The future of retail: Why CPG brands need Perfect Store solutions

The adoption of Perfect Store technology represents a game-changing competitive advantage for CPG brands—especially those managing large product portfolios or extensive distribution networks. Given the ongoing fluctuations in inflation, tariffs, supply chain disruptions, and shifting consumer expectations, modernizing store displays and inventory management has never been more critical.

By implementing Smart Store solutions, both leading CPG brands and retailers can:

• Gain real-time insight into product inventory, pricing and execution.
• Stay ahead of market trends with real-time AI-driven analytics.
• Optimize trade spend management for increased brand equity and sales lift.

The future of retail is AI-powered, data-driven, and hyper-efficient. CPG brands that invest in Perfect Store technology today will lead the industry tomorrow.

Get started: Transform your retail strategy with NTT DATA

Ready to embrace the future of retail? Discover how NTT DATA can help you stay ahead of market trends, optimize product assortment, and enhance operational efficiency with Smart Store technology.

Contact us today to learn more.

In the meantime, download our Global Retail Executive Guide to learn more about retail trends and best practices around the world.