Akeneo: Revolutionizing its product cloud solution by integrating Unifai (now an Akeneo Company) AI, created with Google Cloud
About Akeneo
Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company that enables brands and distributors to create and deliver convincing product experiences across each touchpoint on the customer journey, thanks to a PX strategy. Brands, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers around the world are taking advantage of Akeneo Product Cloud to accelerate their growth initiatives, reduce time to market, and offer engaging customer experiences that convert intentions into purchases.
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Contact usBy acquiring Unifai AI technologies and drawing on the flexibility of model creation and management provided by Vertex AI on Google Cloud, Akeneo is improving the automation, management, and optimization of product information.
Google Cloud results
- Increased employee productivity
- Reduced costs
- Improved customer experience through more complete and precise product listings
- A unified, simple environment for managing and optimizing product information
Three days of work saved per model thanks to automated rollout
Akeneo—a company specializing in product experience (PX) and product information management (PIM) solutions—is helping its customers collect, centralize, harmonize, and enhance information on their products, thus contributing to the optimization of their omnichannel sales strategy. Akeneo also facilitates the integration and management of product information for companies that operate in diverse regions of the world, ensuring it is both precise and adapted to the specific needs of each market.
Strategic synergies
To strengthen its AI and ML abilities, Akeneo recently acquired Unifai, a startup at the cutting edge of progress in the domain of artificial intelligence with a solution that excels in automating the supplier file integration process. This automation accelerates the creation of complete, reliable, and well-categorized product listings, offering the best possible purchasing experience. The combination of these two solutions is already yielding impressive results, as illustrated by shared clients—such as Rexel or Intersport—who are enjoying substantial time savings when it comes to product data management. The competitive edge is the ability to offer products for sale more quickly by eliminating tedious and time-consuming tasks for the teams working for large retailers.
Unifai's solution is mainly aimed at clients who sell on marketplaces. "We use AI to automate the standardization of attributes—dimensions, weights, colors, etc.—and, more broadly, the product listing information in accordance with the specific requirements of each marketplace," explains Data Scientist Maximilien Baudry, Unifai's co-founder and now head of Akeneo's AI and ML department. "The data is then stored in a structured file and integrated into the company's PIM, and this is why synergies between Akeneo and Unifai are so important. Incidentally, we already had shared clients before the acquisition."
"We use AI to automate product listing management in accordance with the specific requirements of each marketplace. The data is then stored in a structured file and integrated into the company's PIM, and this is why synergies between Akeneo and Unifai are so important. Incidentally, we already had shared clients before the acquisition."
—Maximilien Baudry, Head of AI and ML at AkeneoAn AI solution developed with Google Cloud's Vertex AI
For injecting even more AI into its PIM solution, Akeneo made the decision to draw on the solutions developed with Google Cloud and Vertex AI. "This wasn't necessarily the case two years ago," acknowledges Maximilien Baudry. "When we launched Unifai, we chose another cloud service provider. But we were greatly lacking in flexibility. When we do AI R&D, we need to be able to access resources adapted to the project, particularly in terms of notebooks. In other words, the data scientists need to be able to assemble modular VMs, adjusting the resources depending on their needs, whether this means the amount of RAM, vGPU, and so on. Vertex AI offers this flexibility, so we migrated to Google Cloud about a year ago."
With Vertex AI, data scientists can access data, define pipelines, roll out models, and compare and resize the machines, in just a few clicks. "All its features, which are essential for R&D and rolling out models, are available from a single interface," points out Akeneo's head of AI and ML. "The gains in terms of productivity and freedom of innovation are huge. Where I was once losing an average of three days gathering customer data, customizing the training of their model, and then rolling it out, now it's all automated thanks to Vertex AI. To put it another way, I've saved three days."
"With Vertex AI, the creation of notebooks and production launches are automated via Vertex AI Pipelines, and resources are accurately calculated to optimize our costs. And this data and AI infrastructure—which is unified, managed, and fundamentally flexible—simplifies scaling and promotes the streamlining of costs throughout the model's entire lifecycle."
—Maximilien Baudry, Head of AI and ML at AkeneoWhen AI pushes the boundaries of innovation
Maximilien Baudry highlights the flexibility of Vertex AI by explaining how listings were previously generated in asynchronous mode, but Unifai's AI allows creation in real-time upon receipt of the product data from the client. This type of real-time operation strengthens the competitive advantage, which consists of being the first to offer the product on the market with a listing that's complete, reliable, and adapted to the specific requirements of the market or targeted marketplace.
Akeneo's AI and ML teams are also planning to explore the potential of Google Cloud's Generative AI Studio to further refine listings and better categorize products. "The potential is huge," says Sylvain Le Toux, Akeneo's former head of presales for Western Europe who's now in charge of supporting the Unifai integration, as he looks forward to the future. "We'll be able to go further by generating a product image when the client doesn't have one or even promoting videos, and by generating multilingual product descriptions that aren't just simple translations, but texts adapted to a country's culture, for example. With Unifai's experts and Google Cloud's power of innovation in the domain of data and AI, we're ready to reinvent the PIM and product experience market."
In fact, the company has already begun its revolution by creating the first AI Center of Excellence for product experience. This center's mission will be to share best practices, stumbling blocks, and the latest innovations in terms of applying artificial intelligence to the product experience. In particular, Akeneo will draw on the technology developed by Unifai and integrate it directly into its Akeneo Product Cloud solution. Training sessions, webinars, and whitepapers, as well as dedicated case studies, will be developed to support companies in making the most of AI in their product strategies.
"With Unifai's experts and Google Cloud's power of innovation in the domain of data and AI, Akeneo is ready to reinvent the PIM and product experience market."
—Sylvain Le Toux, Unifai and Akeneo Integration ManagerTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Akeneo
Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company that enables brands and distributors to create and deliver convincing product experiences across each touchpoint on the customer journey, thanks to a PX strategy. Brands, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers around the world are taking advantage of Akeneo Product Cloud to accelerate their growth initiatives, reduce time to market, and offer engaging customer experiences that convert intentions into purchases.