Contributed by Robling
Every retail leader has heard the same promise for a few years now: AI is about to change how the business runs. Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects that are not backed by AI-ready data, and in over a dozen private meetings at the Retail Innovation and Transformation Assembly this August, Robling CEO Jeff Buck heard why. Almost nobody asked for another dashboard or another model. What executives described was hundreds of reports nobody can read, weekly numbers still pulled together by hand, and customer, transaction and inventory data sitting in three systems that nothing joins. The decisions that matter, what to buy, what to move, where margin is quietly slipping, keep arriving a step too late, and the data underneath the AI was never ready to answer them.
Robling’s founder, Jeff Buck, has spent more than 25 years on exactly that problem. He built QuantiSense in 2001, sold it to Aptos in 2014, then founded Robling in 2018, and along the way his teams have untangled retail data for names like Pacsun, Belk and Michael Kors. When Robling’s platform pulled Hot Topic’s fulfillment data into one place, it surfaced the split-shipment losses buried in online orders, and the policy change that followed saved over $200,000 in the first weekend alone. Sell-Thru.AI is what that groundwork now feeds: a narrative application that sits on top of the data a retailer already runs, defines every retail measure once using logic hardened across more than sixty retail brands, and scans the full dataset continuously to say what moved, what is off, and why. The piece that makes it possible is a universal semantic layer, and our guide for CIOs walks through the five points that decide whether one actually works.
About Robling
Robling helps retailers unite data across silos and unlock insights that generate millions in new revenue, increased margins and enhanced productivity across the enterprise. Customers like Belk, Hot Topic and Accent Decor use Robling to put data and analytics at the fingertips of everyone who needs it, from data scientists to retail executives, using any BI or analytics front-end tools they prefer. Unlike typical data warehousing approaches, Robling’s Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a product, not an endless project. Robling’s fully cloud-based analytics foundation — featuring connectors to common retail systems — rapidly delivers on retailers’ most valuable and pressing analytic use cases, all backed by the company’s software and its unique blend of retail, technical and analytics expertise.
To learn more, visit robling.io.
