Palantir Technologies and Coles Supermarkets Australia have announced a 3-year partnership to deliver a suite of workforce strategy and analytics tools.
Coles will leverage Palantir platforms, including the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), across its store operations to better understand and address workforce-related spend.
By integrating data into one system, Coles will connect its C-Suite to the shelf-edge in stores across its more than 840 supermarkets.
Coles plans to support decision-making to optimise its workforce – including better workforce planning, shift efficiency, and a more granular understanding of spend as it relates to enhancing the experience for shoppers.
Critically, Store and Department Managers will be able to make real-time decisions to optimise costs and improve both customer and team member experience.
“In line with a broader data strategy, we have partnered with Palantir to explore opportunities to operationalise our Advanced Analytics ‘Smarter Forecast’ and redefine how we think about our workforce. We are excited by the capability the Foundry platform brings to rapidly leverage beyond dashboards, and provide a suite of tools utilising AI to our front-line teams. This will allow them to respond more dynamically to ever-changing trading conditions and customer needs,” said Matt Swindells, Chief Operating & Sustainability Officer. “Our development work with Palantir has demonstrated how we can enhance our ability to ensure all departments are optimally resourced – to provide not only the best return on workforce spend, but to drive better customer outcomes in-store. The most exciting part is that we are only just beginning – with a detailed roadmap of work to deliver over the coming years in line with our Simplify & Save to Invest program.”
Configured on Palantir, the suite of workforce tools will identify opportunities over 10 billion rows of data, comprising each store, team member, shift and allocation across all intervals in a day, every day. Foundry enables these capabilities by bringing legacy data systems and machine learning into a shared end-to-end view of Coles’ retail ecosystem, including Bakery Production Planning tools for in-store bakeries and Ocado Fulfilment Centres.
“Our partnership with Coles – an iconic Australian retailer – demonstrates the strength of our Australian commercial business and continues our growth in the retail industry globally,” said Ashwin Rajan, Head of Commercial for Australia at Palantir. “Our collaboration showcases how Palantir can be integral to core operations at Coles. In a challenging retail environment, we are intending to enable Matt and the Operations teams to drive their digital transformation agenda at scale, empowering front-line teams to leverage the latest in AI and data to deliver enhanced customer and P&L outcomes every day.”
