Introducing VELOCITY® v12: an AI-Powered Retail Data Platform for CPGs
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By Chris Spallino
New Version Release Combines Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and More to Enhance Retail Data Analytics
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Oct. 30, 2025) – Retail Velocity, the leader in retail data collection, reporting, and analytics for the consumer goods industry, today announced the release of the 12th generation of its award-winning VELOCITY® retail data platform, purpose-built for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies seeking to transform retail data into actionable intelligence. The comprehensive update introduces over a dozen powerful features that leverage artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud-native architecture to automate retail data management, improve forecasting accuracy, and accelerate decision-making across the enterprise.
The enhanced cloud-based VELOCITY platform addresses the most persistent challenges facing CPG companies:
- Inconsistent retailer data
- Manual data ingestion and mapping processes
- Data quality issues
- Inability to quickly gain insights from massive, disparate datasets
By integrating with the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and Microsoft OneLake data lake, the new release empowers consumer brands to move from reactive data processing to proactive, AI-driven analytics.
"Consumer goods companies are drowning in retail data but starving for insights," said John Rossi, CEO at Retail Velocity. "Our VELOCITY® 12 release fundamentally changes this equation by further automating the tedious work of data gathering and manipulation while generating the business intelligence that drives better outcomes across sales, marketing, supply chain, and finance teams. We're giving our clients hours back in their day and millions of dollars in improved operational efficiency. Furthermore, having yesterday’s data on your desk the next day—already cleansed and harmonized—drives the most informed strategic decisions."
Intelligent Automation at Scale
Exception Detection
At the heart of the release is AI-powered exception detection that automatically identifies missing retailer files and unexpected patterns across retailer data feeds. The system flags issues, enabling teams to prioritize critical problems while notifying stakeholders faster about data integrity issues that require retailer attention.
Retailer Code Mapping
The platform's intelligent retailer code mapping uses Azure ML and Retail Velocity expertise to automatically match varying retailer item codes to standardized master items by analyzing retailer product descriptions and historical mapping, codes, and patterns. This eliminates countless hours of manual mapping of retailer item codes to manufacturer SKUs or UPCs while improving accuracy through continuous learning and confidence scoring.
Item Description & Product Attribute Cleansing
Item description and product attribute cleansing powered by AI and natural language processing standardizes and enriches master item data, ensuring consistency across attributes like brand and category, along with other custom attributes that can be defined by the client. Complementing this, the new Prime Item Editor enables efficient management of hierarchical item structures, allowing clients to organize products into meaningful groupings that enhance reporting capabilities and data analysis. This foundation enables better product clustering, forecasting, and promotional analysis across the entire product portfolio.
Anomaly Detetction
Anomaly detection using statistical techniques flags stockouts, sales spikes, and pricing errors. In addition, monitoring dashboards provide transparency into data load health and completeness across all retailer feeds.
Advanced Analytics and Forecasting Adaptor
Demand Forecasting Adaptor
The new release introduces a demand forecasting adaptor that leverages historical sales and inventory data for the purpose of predicting future demand at SKU, store, and chain levels. A quick-start adaptor guide and data dictionary allow CPG companies to improve demand forecasting models that incorporate seasonality, holidays, and pricing effects while providing confidence intervals for more informed inventory planning and replenishment strategies.
Product & Store Clustering
Product clustering and store clustering algorithms automatically segment products and locations based on sales performance and operational metrics, uncovering natural groupings that inform merchandising and promotional strategies, inventory management, demand forecasting, resource allocation, and regional planning. These unsupervised ML techniques identify high-performing products, store behavior, niche opportunities, and underperformers without manual analysis.
Weather Data Integration
Weather data integration with business data correlates weather patterns with operational metrics, enabling brands to better anticipate supply chain disruptions, optimize logistics, improve demand forecasting accuracy, and answer the “why” behind low sales or anomalies.
Conversational Intelligence
VELOCITY® now supports natural language querying and interaction through multiple interfaces. A Microsoft Power BI dashboard with Q&A capabilities allows non-technical users (i.e., business users) to ask questions in plain English like "What were Walmart's returns last week compared to previous weeks? How was inventory affected?" This information can help CPGs better determine the economic impact of these scenarios in terms of units and dollars. Additionally, Microsoft Copilot agents and integration will enable automated and intuitive conversational data exploration, AI-assisted reporting, and proactive insight generation directly from VELOCITY datasets in OneLake.
Enterprise-Grade Foundation
Underpinning these innovations is a comprehensive OneLake integration via Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics that automatically synchronizes VELOCITY data and incremental changes into a cloud-native data lake. This modern and advanced architecture eliminates the need for traditional Microsoft Analysis Services cube servers while enhancing data accessibility and enabling advanced analytics and seamless Power BI connectivity and reporting.
The VELOCITY 12 release represents Retail Velocity's commitment to delivering not only timely and high-quality data, but valuable business intelligence—packaged in an intuitive, scalable SaaS platform that grows with consumer goods companies' evolving data and analytics needs.
About Retail Velocity
Since 1994, Retail Velocity has significantly helped consumer goods manufacturers automatically collect, integrate, and leverage the most timely, accurate, and reliable retail sales and inventory data. Using cleansed, harmonized daily demand and supply data at the item and store level, companies develop precise analytics to generate actionable insights and greater business intelligence, helping improve sell-through, eliminate operational inefficiencies, and achieve profitable growth. Retail Velocity’s best-in-class cloud-based retail data platform, VELOCITY®, provides one version of the truth to help enterprise users make collaborative, profitable decisions and accelerate growth for key business areas such as sales, marketing, supply chain, demand planning, finance, operations and IT.
Media Contact:
Chris Spallino
Sr. Director of Marketing and Communications
chris.spallino@retailvelocity.com
