Constantly updated, unified data served as a catalyst for Albertsons Companies to bring other ideas to life—all in service of their goal to provide the “first in fresh” to every consumer, whether that’s produce, meat, bakery goods, deli, or floral.

“Having a consolidated enterprise-wide inventory source is a great foundation for quite a few things,” says Newton.

In a world of expiration dates, the Albertsons Companies’ team decided to focus next on speed and accuracy.

“Data used to be old,” says Newton. “We ran a lot of systems that would run functions weekly, maybe daily, maybe some hourly. That’s not really good enough anymore. Now, we start with real time. Is 30 seconds long enough? Can we take as long as an hour to execute that transaction?”

Deliveries, for example, were previously reported per store each day. Now, with BigQuery’s unified data access, the operations team can know by the minute when a product will arrive at a store, so they can then plan other functions accordingly. The ability to process those large capacities of data as needed has changed how Albertsons Companies orders and maintains inventory levels in-store.

This new, faster way of working naturally led to the team exploring how Albertsons Companies could best apply AI. With freshness top of mind, Newton and team wanted to create a solution to automate the ordering of fresh products and maintain the right inventory levels in stores for those products. At the same time, they considered how to improve in-store production, such as to make fruit bowls, cakes, and more.

“One of the problems of automated ordering is that you’ve got to have those recipes right,” says Newton. “But how do you do that? Nobody comes in to work in the morning and wants to clean up recipe data.”

With speed and data quality baked in, the Albertsons Companies’ team turned their attention—and AI capabilities—to assessing produce quality at distribution centers. They adopted Agent Platform and Vision AI to create their Intelligent Quality Control solution to inspect and rate products as they come into distribution centers. Vision AI accesses advanced vision AI models, so it can capture and analyze product images, then compare them against Albertsons Cos.’s established quality standards (which are higher than even the FDA’s) to create a score that takes into account multiple dimensions of quality. A strawberry’s quality score, for example, is based on seven dimensions.

So, machine learning validates the photo, and AI rates it against the specifications set by the Albertsons Companies team. The distribution center associate then sees this concrete data as they’re deciding whether the product is suitable for market.

“One of the key goals is consistency across individuals who work on different days of the week and across the distribution centers,” says Newton. “We can raise the bar and work with our suppliers to continue to improve the quality of the fresh product we’re delivering to our consumers.”

Newton sees AI as the ideal solution to handle much of the tedious work of cleaning up stale or bad data. Albertsons Companies also uses AI to augment existing applications with smart, high-quality data, and to provide business users with personalized information and insights from data while cutting out mundane and tiresome tasks. This use of AI and automation has been working much more effectively to support business users than creating disparate dashboards, as Newton’s team did in the past.

“They all have dashboard fatigue,” Newton says. “People don’t want to come in the morning and look through 50 dashboards trying to find the thing they should do. AI is really good at going through a whole bunch of data and recommending the six things to look at today.”

Cost savings related to AI use aren’t always direct, Newton notes, but generally produce better outcomes by enabling teams to do things they couldn’t do before. For example, the AI-powered Intelligent Quality Control tool using Vision AI results in fresher products for consumers—boosting customer trust and brand promise, and indirectly leading to increased sales of the high-quality produce.

“We’re getting it from the field to the consumer as fast as possible and at the highest quality in the process,” Newton says. “AI is supporting that journey, and that applies to many cases of AI. It’s providing a better answer to the solutions that exist, therefore letting you optimize the company’s strategy how you want.”

AI also helps sift through massive amounts of data to help employees take action and make decisions that they couldn’t before, because they didn’t have the time to break down data to more granular levels. And Albertsons Companies’ use of Google AI has helped identify every point in the supply chain distribution node and optimized transportation routing—thus reducing the cost of delivering products.

And moving from rigidity to flexibility, broadly, has been a huge benefit to Albertsons Companies and its customers. In addition to better products delivered faster to consumers, their technology adoption has minimized the cost of moving products around.