Is it time for retailers to finally ditch Excel and reams of spreadsheets?
Retail executives are often overwhelmed by massive amounts of data, reports and spreadsheets, leaving little time for effective decision-making. Recognizing this challenge, Mark Chrystal, chief executive officer and cofounder of Profitmind, set out to develop an AI-powered solution that empowers retail teams to prioritize and act on business improvement opportunities with greater speed and accuracy.
Here, Chrystal discusses the inspiration behind Profitmind, shares success stories from leading retailers and highlights the platform’s vision for shaping the future of retail analytics. From leveraging artificial intelligence to streamlining workflows to delivering measurable profit growth, Profitmind is working to reimagine how the retail industry operates in a dynamic and competitive market.
WWD: What inspired the creation of Profitmind, and what specific problem in the retail industry were you aiming to solve?
Mark Chrystal: As a 25-year retail executive, I grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of decision-support tools in the market. Retail teams are drowning in reports, data, BI tools and spreadsheets, requiring time-consuming needle-in-the-haystack investigative work to try and figure out what is going on in the business and what they can do about it. The average retailer has between 10,000 and 25,000 active spreadsheets and thousands of weekly reports. The retail market is far too dynamic for the business teams to be hamstrung by a lack of visibility into what is happening in the business, and also with customers and competitors. As a retail operator with a background in applied analytics, I felt that I was uniquely positioned to address this issue.
To solve the problem, I partnered with Andrew Ng, creator of Google Brain and Coursera and the AI guru who coined the term “Agentic AI.” He recognized the massive opportunity to apply AI in retail and was seeking a partner with deep retail experience. We joined forces and created Profitmind with a focus on helping retail teams identify, quantify and prioritize business improvement opportunities 10 times better than they can do without Profitmind. We are achieving that benchmark and see opportunities to do even better.
WWD: Profitmind’s website mentions an average of 14 percent profit growth for its users. Can you share some specific examples or case studies that illustrate how Profitmind has achieved these results for retailers?
M.C.: Absolutely. A key differentiator of Profitmind’s AI solution is that it’s not just hype. We’re driving real results, fast.
A leading e-commerce intimate apparel retailer identified opportunities to grow annual sales by $12 million and profits by $6.5 million per year. They recognized that they were significantly over-assorted in some categories and used Profitmind’s competitive product matching and pricing analysis to streamline their assortments and optimize pricing. They used Profitmind’s inventory optimization capability to ensure that they are in stock on key basics, increasing customer loyalty and driving repeat business.
Consumer products and services retail chain Batteries Plus+ implemented Profitmind in March 2024 after finding our solution in the Innovation Lab at NRF 2024. They were looking to replace their pricing and web-scraping tools, which gave inadequate market pricing analysis and required labor-intensive, manual competitive product and price matching. Batteries Plus+ quickly implemented Profitmind, including competitive product matching the way a consumer does it: with both exact and similar matches. They replaced their manual Good-Better-Best-Ultimate price tier management in Excel with Profitmind’s automated tool.
Mark Chrystal
Based on Profitmind recommendations, Batteries Plus+ optimized their pricing across their key auto battery category, unlocking $1 million in incremental sales and profits in the first month. These results shifted internal perceptions of their market position. Through effective price tier management, they expanded across the category, driving $4 million higher revenues and profits in auto batteries alone in the first nine months of use.
A top-five worldwide retailer used Profitmind to improve their search engine, driving the best holiday season in the history of their e-commerce business and achieving $200 million in sales growth.
Profitmind is transformative to retailers’ workflows and productivity. An EU home improvement retailer achieved 200 percent price-match improvement while saving 100-plus hours/month in data entry.
Retailers worldwide across a wide range of sectors have achieved significant revenue and profit improvements, including Batteries Plus+, Intergamma, Kirkland’s, Leonisa and Busy Beaver.
WWD: How does Profitmind’s AI platform integrate with a retailer’s existing business processes, and what is the typical onboarding process like for new clients?
M.C.: Customers are typically up and running with Profitmind within four to eight weeks. To get started, customers provide their strategic objectives in plain business language, and their historical data as-is. Profitmind takes that in and scours the internet for proposed competitive product matches for review and approval by the business team. From then on, Profitmind continuously provides quantified, prioritized business improvement recommendations.
Profitmind is an AI intelligence layer that sits above the retailer’s current systems for managing pricing, inventory, merchandise planning, product development, etc. It is designed to integrate into the existing processes and make them more efficient, notably the Monday decision-making process.
Once decisions are made on Profitmind’s recommendations, they are exported in the format of choice to the appropriate execution system. Results are tracked, measured and reported within the Profitmind platform. Profitmind also learns from user feedback and performance of the business, retraining itself every week to try and produce better action recommendations to the business teams.
WWD: With the retail landscape constantly evolving, what are Profitmind’s plans for future development and innovation to stay ahead of the curve?
M.C.: Profitmind’s goal is to be the primary AI intelligence for corporate retail decision-making. This means that we must have best-in-class continuous learning, innovation and market adaptation processes at our core.
We started development with a focus on competitive pricing, assortment and inventory intelligence. Profitmind now has studied thousands of retail decisions and 10 million-plus products across most industry segments and already possesses the equivalent of 1,000 years of retail knowledge. We are asking our customers to tell us where to go deeper into these areas and where else they need help. In the near future, we see opportunities to better support marketing, allocation and FP&A [financial planning and analysis] teams.
WWD: What is your vision for the future of retail analytics, and how does Profitmind plan to play a role in shaping that future?
M.C.: We believe that Profitmind is going to lead a significant portion of the evolution of the retail industry, in particular, focused on decision-making and analytics. The future of retail is merchants armed with AI intelligence that provides them with the exact information they need to understand what is happening, where it is happening, and how they can capitalize on it. Profitmind intends to be that AI intelligence that is the fuel for current and future retail merchants and decision-makers.
