On 22 March 2024, Markant founded a company – retail.ai GmbH. «Retail» stands for our sector – companies from industry and retail in the food and DIY store sector. «ai» is the abbreviation for «artificial intelligence». retail.ai GmbH was founded in collaboration with two independent experts: business economist Prof Dr Christian Au from Mainz University of Applied Sciences and AI expert Prof Dr Peter Gentsch from Aalen University.
retail.ai GmbH is the trusted, co-operative provider of generative AI in the FMCG sector. Based on a unique data alliance, we develop innovative AI solutions together with our partner network and enable companies to utilise them. In this way, we not only promote the knowledge development of our partners, but also our own – by sharing knowledge. There is further potential for Markant: we are sensitising our employees to the use of generative AI and will also be offering training courses on the topic in future.
As a specialised field of artificial intelligence, «generative AI» deals with software that can independently generate new content. Currently, this is usually text, images, music or videos. retail.ai GmbH wants to make this technology usable for our sector.
The portfolio of retail.ai GmbH includes four specific business modules:
- Product Factory: Product development along the entire value chain. One example is the Product Wizard, which generates channel- and target group-specific product descriptions.
- Academy: Knowledge transfer and workshop, particularly in terms of the basics of generative AI, ethics and data protection as well as industry-specific use cases.
- Lab: Establishment of a research lab for generative AI and large language models.
- Alliance: Discussion of topics, challenges, best practice examples and optimisation potential as well as the establishment of a data alliance.