Karthik Iyer

Join retail, consumer goods, and travel & hospitality leaders for a deep dive into how Databricks’ open, agnostic platform is powering the next era of intelligent commerce single foundation built on a single intelligent platform with elusive enterprise knowledge. From real-time personalization to collaborative supply chains connecting retailers and suppliers, discover how the industry’s most ambitious companies are bringing together structured and unstructured governed data to deploy AI that actually understands their business. This forum explores the imperatives reshaping the industry: demand intelligence, dynamic pricing, retail media monetization and AI-powered employee productivity. Through candid conversations and real-world results, hear directly from leaders already delivering measurable outcomes and leave with a practical playbook for scaling AI across the organization.

Retail promotion decisions involve billions of dollars and millions of interdependencies — yet most AI systems produce recommendations that merchants cannot explain, validate, or trust. Albertsons built a different kind of merchandising intelligence. Using 70 billion rows of transaction data processed on the Databricks Lakehouse, they modeled item and promotion relationships as reusable graph structures — what they call Promo Molecules — that explicitly surface demand shifts including substitution effects, halo effects, and cannibalization. These structures are not black boxes. They expose deterministic, merchant-validated signals that can be audited and acted on with confidence. Foundation models then reason probabilistically to answer natural-language what-if questions, enabling merchant-trusted promotion decisions at scale without manual overrides. In this session, Karthik Iyer explains the structure-first AI architecture behind Albertsons' merchandising intelligence platform, the business outcomes it is driving, and why explainability — not just accuracy — is the key to unlocking AI adoption in retail. This is a session for CMOs, CDOs, and retail executives who are done…