Monday, December 1, 2025

From strawberries in Maidenhead to superior pricing intelligence

In 1989, Marks & Spencer confronted a problem. Their shops closed on Sundays, leaving any unsold contemporary produce, like strawberries, to go to waste by Saturday night time. They turned to new expertise—the IBM PC and the revolutionary C++ programming language—to develop an answer that might predict strawberry gross sales. They tasked a younger specialist—somebody who really understood PCs—to construct a neural community. That particular person was me.

I pulled in every bit of information out there within the M&S universe—inside gross sales knowledge, exterior elements, all the pieces—poured it into the mannequin, and let the neural community get to work. The consequence? My mannequin did not outguess the only predictor: simply repeating final week’s numbers. However this failure planted a seed. I knew the potential was there. The issue wasn’t the expertise; it was the restrictions of our knowledge and our potential to course of it quick sufficient.

Quick ahead 35 years, and it’s clear how far we’ve come. That early experiment taught me two vital classes: First, the standard of the query is vital. In AI, this precept has grown into what we now name immediate engineering. Second, knowledge is all the pieces. One small, seemingly irrelevant piece of information can unlock huge insights if it’s the appropriate piece.

Similar to in Nineteenth-century London when John Snow cracked the cholera puzzle by noticing a single missed knowledge level—folks drawing water from a selected pump—we have discovered that extra knowledge offers higher solutions. For Shopper Intelligence, this perception is on the coronary heart of our success. Over the previous decade, we’ve constructed an unlimited reservoir of information. Yearly, we collect insights from tens of hundreds of automotive and residential insurance coverage consumers, accumulating thousands and thousands of worth factors and pairing them with wealthy client knowledge verified for accuracy.

This huge pool of information is extra than simply numbers—it’s a treasure trove of potential, ready for the appropriate questions. And now, we’re asking these questions. Via AI, neural networks, and machine studying, we’re remodeling our potential to offer groundbreaking insights to our purchasers. We’re not simply predicting strawberry gross sales—we’re serving to firms navigate an more and more advanced market with precision pricing methods.

At Shopper Intelligence, the long run is shiny. With machine studying on our aspect, we’re unlocking deeper insights, quicker responses, and smarter options for our purchasers. Every bit of information holds the promise of innovation—and we’re right here to verify our purchasers keep forward of the curve.


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