Aakriti Bhargava Develops AI/ML for Intelligent Retail Pricing and Analytics Solutions 

Ms. Bhargava will discuss how AI and Generative AI are tackling retail’s most persistent challenges on the “Retail Reimagined” panel at Google Cloud Next ’24.

Next generation artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools are transforming the retail industry, from supply chain and pricing to the customer experience, across the spectrum of goods and services. In the grocery industry, technologies that are already reshaping business processes—along with tools on the horizon—were in evidence at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual conference, held in January 2024 in New York City. Among the dozens of technology vendors unveiling revolutionary products was Revionics, an Aptos company, that is the market leader in AI-powered lifecycle price optimization software for retailers based in the U.S. and worldwide. 

Aakriti Bhargava is Senior Director and Head of AI, Data, and Engineering for Revionics, where she drives overall technical strategy, architecture, and innovation across the engineering organization. Since earning her Masters in Information Systems Management (MISM) from Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Bhargava has specialized in retail data science, engineering, and analytics, leveraging her extensive experience and subject matter expertise in e-commerce, consumer behavior, demand modeling, and compute infrastructure to develop cutting-edge applications that help retailers solve their unique business challenges. 

Ms. Bhargava now oversees Revionics’ eight global engineering teams, working across the U.S., U.K., and India. Her broad scope of responsibilities includes supervising engineering and science in multiple verticals, including AI/ML, Data, Analytics, Application Development, Quality Assurance (QA), and Applied Science, as well as long and short-term strategic planning for the company. She additionally plays a pivotal role in standardizing global hiring practices for the Revionics engineering organization, establishing new international engineering teams, mentoring and developing engineering talent, and fostering an engineering organizational culture of continuous learning, growth, and collaboration. 

In recent years, Ms. Bhargava has spearheaded initiatives to pioneer advances in AI/ML tools, leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and TensorFlow with Revionics’ proprietary algorithms. These advances make the company’s AI framework more accurate, reliable, and scalable, while expediting its product time to market. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, she is continuing to define and execute on a vision that is enabling Revionics to expand into new markets and capitalize on growth opportunities.  

Ms. Bhargava says, “Retail businesses operate in increasingly dynamic and competitive environments, and the ability to optimize pricing strategies becomes crucial for maximizing revenue and profitability. Revionics is leading the industry, serving many of the world’s largest retailers, because our AI software successfully optimizes prices at scale. We’ve achieved this by designing creative solutions to a range of engineering challenges, from training millions of models simultaneously, to dealing with sparsity and collinearity in the data, to the need to retrain the AI frequently given the dynamic market conditions that are constantly diminishing the usefulness of old data.” 

At the NRF conference, Revionics introduced a new Generative AI chatbot—a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system, that combines search (retrieval) and large language models (LLMs) with its proprietary intelligent pricing platform, enabling retailers to easily access industry-specific data and information. “For example, the chatbot can guide a Pricing Analyst to navigate the complicated problem space of pricing, given rules and constraints set at a granular product level. The chatbot was built with strict relevance thresholds to ensure that it answers a user’s question precisely and accurately, so that its Generative AI will not hallucinate or make up answers when it lacks enough context. It also provides references for further information in its responses,” says Ms. Bhargava. 

“The new chatbot is unique because it has been designed to align with retailers’ underlying needs and standards, using Google’s enterprise-grade privacy, security, and governance protocols to protect consumer and organizational data,” she adds. “Retailers can learn and gain a lot from our science. We want to make this information easily accessible to our customers, and Generative AI is a perfect tool to make these quick analytic insights readily available. Using this chatbot, today our users can ‘talk’ to our product manuals or customer support and help sections; tomorrow we want to allow them to talk directly to their data.” 

Ms. Bhargava will be discussing Revionics’ new chatbot and other innovations as a member of the panel on “Retail Reimagined: Google Cloud and ISV Partners Drive AI-Powered Solutions” at Google Cloud Next ’24. The industry-leading conference, to be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, in April 2024, features some of the world’s leading technology experts and thought leaders. As a member of this prestigious panel, she will talk through how AI is transforming the future of retail, with groundbreaking innovations in personalized marketing, intelligent inventory management, precision pricing, and enhanced customer experiences.   

Ms. Bhargava is also dedicated to encouraging more young women to become data scientists/engineers and helping to model career pathways for women to rise to senior leadership roles in AI and engineering. In addition to speaking at tech and retail industry conferences about AI-driven forecasting, pricing, and related topics, she enjoys participating in events such as the “Women in Tech” panel discussion hosted by the MongoDB Women’s Group, where she was one of three female tech leaders offering insights and guidance about forging a path in a technology career. She also participates in enterprise-wide panel discussions as an expert resource for other women at Aptos and Revionics.  

Ms. Bhargava says that her own career may provide a roadmap for other young women who aspire to leadership positions. Prior to joining Revionics in July 2021, she worked for six years as a data scientist at an American multinational corporation that pioneered consumer savings platforms. There, she quickly rose from a Data Science Analyst to leading a full stack data scientist team, overseeing impactful ML initiatives like personalization and coupon ranking.

When she joined Revionics as a Senior Manager, she used the leadership skills she had developed previously to manage a team of data scientists, ML engineers, and software engineers to streamline the consistent delivery of new modeling features and common services, and created new processes to improve production support, which had historically taxed Research and Development capacity. She additionally worked closely with cross-functional teams to roll out a new AI platform to customers that resulted in a 10-15% increase in forecast accuracy. This and other accomplishments led to her rapid promotion to Director of Data and Data Science, followed by her promotion to her current Senior Director and Head of AI, Data, and Engineering role just six months later.

“One of the big challenges of being in the AI field is that you have to understand not only the underlying theory and technology, but also the business domain you are trying to solve for. You will never be given perfectly clear requirements, so you have to learn how to ask the right questions to optimize for the right solution. The ability to connect these dots between technology and business, and use this knowledge to build systems that perform at scale, separates success from failure,” says Ms. Bhargava.