Boost agility and profit margins with an AI platform for retail

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Karen Rhodes - Account Chief Technologist for Retail, HPE
Anand Muralidaran - Global Strategy and Business Development for Retail, NVIDIA

Retailers are transforming how they work to keep pace with competitors and the increasing demands of consumers. The development of new products, services, and omnichannel features combined with explosive data growth and shrinking margins are pushing retailers to work faster and smarter than ever. While these trends come with challenges, they also bring big opportunities.

Leading retailers are adopting new technologies to improve brand loyalty and boost profits. Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping achieve this vision by driving better-than-ever efficiency to each area of operations. Across all store operations, AI harnesses critical data from store operations and consumers and delivers timely insights at the edge—where seconds count. By investing in AI, retailers can make strategic decisions and take real-time action to enable frictionless shopping experiences, more sales, increased security, and higher satisfaction that will lead to increased revenue.

Adopting purpose-built AI solutions for retail

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is collaborating with NVIDIA to empower retailers to work smarter with AI solutions built specifically for them. We developed the AI Platform for Retail to accelerate transformation and bring game-changing insights and automation to intelligent stores and supply chains. Our pioneering systems, software, and models combined with the expertise and robust computing breakthroughs from HPE create a solution stack that makes it easy to tap into AI, regardless of the location or application.

At the foundation of this stack is a broad portfolio of NVIDIA-Certified HPE systems that bring unmatched compute power and agility with the latest NVIDIA GPUs. Each system is validated for speed, scale, and manageability to run diverse AI workloads.

On top of the hardware layer, HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric is the backbone of the AI platform. Data fabric technology allows seamless access to data across hybrid environments. Retailers can access data sets that are analytics-ready to process information easily and train highly accurate AI models. Multiple apps and users can reuse the same datasets, which reduces the amount of infrastructure dedicated to analytics and delivers insights on demand. The fabric also supports a variety of open source tools for analyzing data wherever it lives—across on-premises, multiple clouds, and edge environments.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise is the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform. It offers 100+ frameworks, pretrained models, development tools, security, and API stability to accelerate data science and to streamline development and deployment of production AI for generative AI, computer vision, and speech AI. The suite features end-to-end AI software, certified to run on HPE AI platforms, that enables rapid model training and inference in edge and near-edge environments and includes an extensive catalog of cloud-native software to ramp up the building and deployment of AI models, so retailers can innovate quickly and focus on gaining insights faster to drive action and ROI.

To expand AI-at-scale capabilities, HPE is integrating Pachyderm to run on the data fabric. Pachyderm software streamlines data processing and workflow management for even large-scale AI applications. Pachyderm provides historic data insights while processing only today's new data to save time and energy. For retailers, this means automating machine learning (ML) pipelines and simplifying the AI journey.

HPE ML Development Environment (MLDE) offers the fastest way to create enterprise-scale ML models. HPE MLDE reduces the complexity and cost associated with model development so retailers can automate model training and collaborate quickly and securely to ensure the best possible results.

To make all this possible, HPE integrates storage solutions for AI that enable full performance and capacity at scale with cost-effectiveness built in. Combined with high-speed HPE and Aruba networking tools and technologies, retailers can simplify data management and increase security across locations to keep moving forward, faster.

Transforming from edge to cloud

Retailers can leverage AI as a cloud model through HPE GreenLake to keep pace with the demands of AI while reducing infrastructure costs. Retailers can utilize the entire AI Platform for Retail on a pay-per-use basis and scale quickly as their needs evolve. HPE GreenLake offers a variety of services to extend AI capabilities to any location—including HPE GreenLake for AI and analytics, ML, and MLOps.

HPE, in collaboration with NVIDIA, offers all the tools and expertise for retailers to convert data into intelligence and maintain a competitive edge. Let us help you deliver compelling shopping experiences. Learn more with our AI Platform for Retail solutions overview, and visit the AI Pavilion (Booth 378) sponsored by NVIDIA at HPE Discover to meet with some leading AI vendors for retail.

Karen Rhodes is an Account Chief Technologist for HPE who specializes in providing direction to global retail business leaders on emerging technologies. This includes cybersecurity, loss prevention, and AI/ML/DL for supply chain optimization and omnichannel enablement initiatives. She guides technical specialists and various business units within HPE and is responsible for diversifying HPE business within retail customers by focusing on financial and business outcomes.

Anand is the Global Business Development Head for Retail at NVIDIA and brings 25 years of valuable experience consulting, partnering, and delivering strategic and transformative value to F1000 Retailers across the globe. He has had the privilege of working across a variety of retailers from Walmart, Target, and Petco to Best Buy, Williams Sonoma, Sephora, and many others.