In today’s fast-paced world, artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a buzzword — it’s a game-changer for businesses looking to stay ahead. But how do you turn complex data into actionable insights and real revenue?

In our latest conversation, Bill Lovejoy (Telaid's Vice President of Solution Services) from Telaid joins Joy Chua (meldCX's EVP of Strategy and Development), to explore how businesses can unlock AI's potential. From harnessing data to driving real-world ROI, this discussion is packed with strategies, success stories, and actionable advice you don’t want to miss.

Watch the full conversation below:

Featuring:

• Joy Chua - EVP of Strategy and Development, meldCX
• Bill Lovejoy - Vice President of Solution Services, Telaid

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Bill Lovejoy: Welcome everyone. My name is Bill Lovejoy and I'm the director of solution services at Telaid. Today we're talking about frictionless retail innovation and empowering the customer experience with AI and machine learning. And who better to help us understand that than Joy from meldCX. Hi Joy, thanks so much for joining me today.

Would you please just quickly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your role at meldCX? Thanks.

[00:00:33] Joy Chua: Of course. So thank you so much, Bill. And hi, everyone who's listening as well. My name is Joy. The official title is Executive Vice President of Strategy and Development here at meldCX.

Essentially what I do is work with amazing partners like Telaid to be able to take our solutions that we have, bring it to market and service multiple verticals with our vision analytics product. We love retail. Retail is a key part of what. We saw this as meldCX and I'm really glad for the interview and really excited to showcase what we can do.

[00:01:03] Bill Lovejoy: How do you describe what meldCX does to those outside your industry?

[00:01:07] Joy Chua: meldCX stands for Melding to Customer Experience. We are a global company that Has bases all across the world. We've got a huge base in North America, but we're also widely represented in EMEA and also in APJC. Essentially what meldCX does is, as I mentioned before, we are a vision analytics company, what we do is we extract visual data from sensors that could mean cameras, we extract that, pass that through the models that we do and algorithms that we do.

And then we surf that up and visualize that data into dashboards and our portal for customers to not only do critical actions, but most importantly, also use those visual insights that we get from the data to be able to promote critical thinking and especially critical thinking about where the business growth should be matching that to what actually helps with conversion and actually provide those details back to customers and retailers so that they're able to plan and map.

What's next is a strategy based on this data for the next five years, for example.

[00:02:08] Bill Lovejoy: Of course, you all are working with many leading retailers. What is the top concern you hear them express?

[00:02:14] Joy Chua: We actually had the pleasure of working with one of the large OEMs globally to participate in a little bit of a CIO playbook that was just released in March, 2024 this year, where we're talking about AI.

We're talking about the top business priorities, especially with retail and adopting emerging technologies. When we surveyed all these different CIOs and anyone with a Chief Digital, Chief Innovation, IT kind of function. We found a couple of top business priorities. One was all about amplifying capability by leveraging technology.

So technology could be things especially like AI or anything to do with visual analytics that led to data. The second was all about how they could also improve customer experience and satisfaction. The third was how all of that could help and contribute to revenue and profit growth. For certain regions as well, we did see a high increase in ask about improving sustainability and reducing waste.

And the last was concerns as well about business agility and responsibility, especially about leveraging technology, how that could impact not only the stakeholders internally, but also their customers. What we see in the market was customers really asking that question, especially to us, how does vision analytics change?

Help us amplify our strengths. How does that help us serve more customers, improve the customer experience without increasing costs? But at the same time, how does visual analytics AI help us reduce barriers where we can look into opportunities that are actually preventing growth, eating into margins, and how do we use technology to piece that all together?

And also all under the same banner that can provide that privacy protection, making sure that All our data is kept secure and private, and so we've been hearing a lot from the retailers and we've really been looking at some of their concerns and we believe we have the solution for it.

[00:04:17] Bill Lovejoy: Can you tell us more about how meldCX addresses those concerns?

[00:04:21] Joy Chua: We've definitely taken the feedback that we've heard from these retailers. A key point was how could we rapidly help them prove business cases? How could we help them put a playbook together that could help them address their business outcomes, but also sell that internally to the business? Because like it or hate it really, retail is the oldest trade.

It's a tale as old as time. Everything has been structured around retail since eons ago. And it is a crazy, beautiful, and diverse space to be in. Even as we talk about retail, we not only dive into kind of CIOs, CTOs, but also business ops people and also the marketers, all with the same goal that I mentioned before about amplifying strengths and reducing barriers that can impede growth.

What we've done is to accelerate that and to really help. Our stakeholders, our business sponsors, be able to prove and validate. What we've done is work with partners like Telaid, of course, to create off the shelf AI use cases that can be used in the retail vertical especially, all with the goal to quickly and rapidly prove business outcomes so that We can test and validate business principles using our AI and visual analytics modules, all with the help of Telaid from an install perspective, making it really easy so that our retail customers can prove it, show the business use case, show the insights that I had, and then really move to that next step where they can also provide those data to be part of the critical thinking that's needed across the whole business.

Right, the whole business, that data and what we learn about our customers can be used to provide explosive growth.

[00:06:02] Bill Lovejoy: Could you share with me maybe a couple sample use cases?

[00:06:06] Joy Chua: Two use cases come to mind straight away. The first use case is what we call zone engagement of destinations. So essentially that's using visual data.

Populating that with select zones in a physical space. Not only do we have zones in a physical space, we can go even further to be able to look at specific pinpoint destinations in a specific zone. So I'll give you an example. Say I walk into an IT store. I can zone out from an overall floor plan where the footwear section is.

Where the ready to wear section is, that's the zones, I can then go into the specific destinations within the zones. I can put a pin specifically into Air Jordans, I can put a pin into say tops, I can put a pin into running tights and all of that. So essentially what we can do is then understand maybe for myself as a female within this age range, I walk to the footwear section.

And then I go to the ready to wear section, but what do I eventually check out? Maybe I'm spending a lot of time in the running tight section, but I eventually only check out tops. Why is that? Maybe it's price. Maybe it's the material. Maybe I'm actually considering how do I then layer that with the digital experiences.

These are some of the things that we can provide to our retailers and formulate really grounded hypotheses. Based on visual data that's actually happening. So what we're essentially mapping is that interest to engagement and that conversion ratio, which is really important for retailers.

[00:07:42] Bill Lovejoy: That allows the retailer to almost mirror what they're doing with their e commerce.

Right? So if I go to an e commerce site, they know what I looked at and they also know what I actually bought. And essentially you're able to, to mirror that in, in the store environment, which I don't really think has ever been possible.

[00:08:02] Joy Chua: Yeah, 100 percent and Bill, you've hit the nail on the head.

Essentially, one of our key taglines is how we track patterns that matter, how we provide a conduit to do an omnichannel experience, be able to match how people are interacting in store versus the digital experiences, matching that to demographic, matching that to conversion, and potentially how that also translates to digital experience.

And as we follow the sales funnel, We learned so many things and all that data and all that insight is really geared and channeled to be able to help retailers use that to promote. The critical thinking as an organization that you can take and then plan for that next stage of growth together. So the second one that we found a lot of success in was around eyeball to content metrics.

So that was essentially using visual analytics to work on the interest to engagement funnel. So you had me talk about zone engagement to destinations where you mapped out interest to engagement to conversion. This part was all about the attract. To interest, to engagement, to understand the use and the purpose of digital assets in driving interest, engagement, and then further on to revenue.

It's all about working with retailers to map out how do ads and ads on digital screens contribute to the interest and engagement ratio. So to give you an example, how specific ads actually help conversion, not only In store, but also out of store. So when you walk past an ad that's playing outside of the retail chain or the grocery chain, does that actually influence you to go inside?

When you go inside, does that actually catch your eye again? Does that actually lead you to pick up a product, put it in your basket and check out? So we're actually mapping that. We're also going a step further. It's not only within the shopping mall, it's also externally on billboards outside the shopping mall to see whether certain ads actually influence people to come into the shopping mall to pick something up.

So it's a really large stitching exercise of data where we're mapping across multiple locations to see how that works from. Outdoors to indoors to digital screen and conversion. The key part of it as well is we're having retailers be able to maximize the value of digital screens. We've got a lot of retailers who could potentially outsource their retail screens to out of home media networks.

They're paid or having the proof of play data that's based on visual analytics. Provided by meldCX allows retailers to, in a way, fact check what has been played on screens, what demographic looks at the screens, and then tailor a rate card for brands and advertisers who want to look at specific screens in specific venues and make sure that they're actually getting Bang for buck, but a digital screen and being able to maximize the digital assets that they have in store.

[00:10:59] Bill Lovejoy: So now I'm curious, how does meldCX's solution impact the shopping experience?

[00:11:05] Joy Chua: A couple of ways. We're making things intuitive. We're making things frictionless. We're making things more interesting and engaging from the customer's perspective, where we're able to serve content or things that actually engage and interest you.

When you're actually spending time in a retail store, we're actually tailoring that for you and we've got statistics that say that customers actually want that. Customers actually don't want to waste their time. They want to know what's a value to them. So that's definitely the first part. The second part is we can use AI to reduce and optimize wait times by allowing the AI to provide us data and statistics on how we can optimize staffing.

We can understand queue times. How do we make that long queue process more interesting and engaging? With people waiting in queue, we have their attention. How do we upsell them? How do we eventually lead to pause and conversion?

[00:11:57] Bill Lovejoy: This all really sounds amazing. Assuming a retailer wants to implement the meldCX solutions, what does that installation process look like?

What's the typical timeframe for implementation?

[00:12:10] Joy Chua: With installation, We definitely do work with amazing partners like Telaid to be able to make that as frictionless. And our goal is to make that as frictionless and as easy and as painless as possible for retailers. We've got a very strong kind of systemic approach to how we run, do site surveys and actually install.

We will work with retailers and we already come prepared with A build of materials to be able to help you run something really easily. Telaid has also been briefed on site survey questionnaires. We do that really seamlessly. That's all done. We've all been trained. What we aim to do is work with retailers to do an install of cameras, work with really good install partners like Telaid.

And then we aim, once we've set everything up, we've double checked the field of view for you to be able to get data within 48 to 72 hours. of an install. So that's how quick and easy it is. That's definitely for our off the shelf products as well. And that's something that we really work to deliver to our customers, because we know the data story is the most important and the data is what's actually going to drive actionable insights, going to drive those systemic changes that we need to be able to help organizations.

[00:13:24] Bill Lovejoy: Thanks, Joy. I appreciate you joining us today to share some insights into meld's solution and capabilities. Where can we learn more about meldCX's solutions?

[00:13:33] Joy Chua: If you're attending NRF 2025, we're going to be at Talley's booth, number 6053. Also, please come visit us on our website, www. meldcx. com, or our LinkedIn page.

Search meldCX as well. And yeah, we'll be in multiple centers, especially with some of Tellit's key partners as well. We'll be at multiple booths. We're keen to have you come down, keen to have you join us. We'll love to have further conversations with you.

[00:14:00] Bill Lovejoy: Awesome. Thanks so much, Joy. This has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time with me today.

[00:14:05] Joy Chua: No worries. Thank you so much.