‍By Himanshu Jain, SVP Product @ CommerceIQ

As generative AI technology matures, businesses across industries are racing to implement solutions that will enhance their products and services; but in the retail sector, adoption has been largely superficial. While genAI tools like ChatGPT and chatbots have made significant inroads for content creation and customer service, brands and retailers still struggle to implement AI solutions that unlock growth opportunities and ultimately impact the bottom line.

The challenge: Why chatbots alone aren’t enough to drive meaningful growth

Many companies rely on generic chatbots to provide quick answers to their customers and their internal teams, but are missing AI's true potential to drive business outcomes. Why? General-purpose AI tools like chatbots lack the industry-specific context and integrated data connections needed to provide accurate, actionable insights for highly specialized business use cases. And in retail, where data accuracy and contextual relevance are crucial, these limitations can lead to errors that risk jobs, customer trust and revenue. Common issues with generic genAI solutions include:

• Performance limitations: Most genAI models can’t handle complex business use cases, leading to inaccurate or misleading results.
• Low-value output: GenAI often struggles with inaccuracies and hallucinations, delivering false outputs due to incomplete data connections.
• Lack of context: Chatbots don’t understand the unique needs of different roles, industries or brands—leading to generic, surface-level answers that are neither insightful nor actionable.

Meet Nexis: Reimagining genAI with unified data and contextual insights

Nexis by CommerceIQ is a role-based AI solution tailored for commerce marketing and sales professionals. Unlike generic chatbots, Nexis connects diverse data points with deep retail context to deliver actionable, precise omnichannel insights—empowering teams to make informed, real-time decisions up to 100x faster than before. Here’s how:

1. Unified data for a single source of truth

At the core of Nexis is a unified, connected database that aggregates data from point-of-sale, retail media and the digital shelf to create a single source of truth for retail insights. This connected dataset eliminates issues with siloed information, allowing Nexis to generate insights that are accurate, comprehensive and industry-specific. Its “unified taxonomy” doesn’t just organize information; it facilitates sophisticated analysis, helping brands and retailers answer critical questions about growth drivers like price elasticity, incremental growth and customer behavior.

2. Unique data points & insights

Connected data alone isn’t enough. Nexis builds on its unified dataset with proprietary models that generate unique, highly relevant data points brands need to make informed decisions. This approach delivers actionable insights that traditional generative AI can’t produce on its own. Using advanced machine learning models to understand and interpret key business drivers, Nexis provides retail professionals with a deeper level of understanding about their products, categories and market dynamics.

3. Context-rich, role-specific insights

Nexis recognizes that context is king. Different roles within a business require different insights; for example, a marketer’s focus differs greatly from that of a sales professional. Drawing from extensive market research, experience with thousands of retail personas, daily category scraping and retailer data analysis, Nexis integrates industry, category, and role-specific context into every interaction. By “downloading” the knowledge of various roles, Nexis can anticipate what metrics and insights matter most to its human teammates, cutting their reporting time by 75%.

4. Enhanced CPG workflows & learning capabilities

The more context you feed into an AI system, the smarter it becomes. Nexis’s large language models (LLMs) are trained on extensive retail-specific data, enriched by a feedback loop where user interactions and internal testing continually improve the tool. This ongoing learning process refines the Nexis’s performance, ensuring it becomes even more precise and valuable with every use.

Beyond chatbots: Revolutionizing retail with genAI for smarter, faster decision-making

Nexis is transforming how retailers harness the power of generative AI, connecting diverse data sources, applying business context and tailoring insights to specific roles.

Nexis is creating an AI platform that doesn’t just chat—it understands, analyzes and delivers results.

For retail professionals, this means not only smarter, faster decision-making, but gaining a competitive edge with specialized insights for growth that generic chatbots simply can’t provide.

Key capabilities for retail professionals include:

• Pre-built deck templates: Effortlessly create reports with ready-to-use templates for Weekly Business Reviews (WBR), Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR) and more.
• Customizable slide library: Users can pull from a library of slides tailored to their business questions—like “Show me all the campaigns with a drop in ROAS”—and quickly add them to a presentation.
• Insight-driven analysis: From identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) to analyzing root causes, Nexis gives users a comprehensive view of what’s happening in their data and why. For instance, it might reveal how an increase in ad spend drove a corresponding lift in ad sales, presenting the insights in a clear, actionable way.
• Top mover reporting: Retailers can easily track their highest and lowest-performing SKUs or portfolios, helping them make informed decisions about resource allocation.
• Branded, editable reports: Users can download reports as fully formatted, editable PowerPoint files or export data in CSV format, allowing for custom edits to charts, colors and content on the fly.
• Ad-hoc analysis: Nexis allows users to ask specific questions on the spot, instantly generating answers in a slide-ready format that fits seamlessly into existing presentations.

For retail professionals who are looking for ways to drive performance across channels, slapping a chatbot on top of an existing tool is not enough. In an industry where accuracy, customization and relevance are key, Nexis is setting a new standard for how genAI can drive value in retail—going beyond chatbots to become an indispensable partner in strategic decision-making.

Ready to see how Nexis can supercharge your ecommerce performance? Request a demo.