A.S.Watson, the largest international health and beauty retailer in Asia and Europe, will be investing at least $70 million (approximately HKD540 million) in the coming three years in Rubikloud, a Toronto based leading machine learning intelligence platform for enterprise retailers.
In order to power the company’s big data and machine learning roadmap, ASW will partner with Rubikloud to deploy Rubicore, the company’s data enterprise platform built for easier artificial intelligence applications plug-in. It will also incorporate two of its machine learning applications (Promotion Manager and Lifecycle Manager) in ASW’s network of 13,300 retail stores and 14 brands across 25 Asian and European markets.
Rubicore will aim to enhance operational efficiencies within ASW, by integrating different databases from across business units and sources, into a single, elastic cloud enabled database. This is expected to shorten the roll-out lead time of current and future machine learning tools of Rubikloud by 50-80%.
The ASW Rubikloud partnership started in 2015, and in just 10 months Rubikloud’s machine-learning application Lifecycle Manager successfully increased sales from direct to customer CRM campaigns by more than 8%.
“We are investing in big data amid global economic uncertainties because we believe that technology is a critical enabler for successful retailing in today’s world. With the right technology, we will be able to focus our resources, from the backend support to shop floor, on building better customer experience. Rubikloud has cutting-edge machine learning applications and their new thinking in data science is a true value-add to our well established retail experience.”, says Malina Ngai, JP, Chief Operating Officer of A.S. Watson Group, setting high expectations on the big data partner appointment.