Key takeaways
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AI levels the playing field
Metcash helps independents compete with chain retailers using advanced AI. -
Connected data drives action
AI unifies siloed data to deliver fast, actionable insights. -
Generative AI saves time
Tasks that took hours—like root cause analysis—now happen instantly. -
Agentic AI automates decisions
AI agents trigger real-time actions, like restocking or shelf updates. -
Simple, strategic rollout wins
Success comes from clear goals: make it easy, efficient, and empowering.
AI continues to prove it is a force for growth and efficiency in the retail industry, with the power to streamline operations, surface powerful insights, and empower independent retailers to compete at scale.
The latest evidence of this phenomenon was visible at NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show APAC where senior executives from Metcash and SymphonyAI were among the featured speakers. Estella Young, a senior merchant with Metcash, the leading partner of independent retailers in Australia and New Zealand, and Jonathan Tye Walker, Senior Vice President with SymphonyAI, offered a case study in how with the right partnership and vision, the future of retail belongs to those who can turn insight into action—at speed, at scale, and with a human touch.
Young and Tye Walker explored in detail how AI is bringing powerful transformational benefits to retailers, a recurring theme at an event that drew nearly 10,000 attendees to Singapore. Their engaging discussion explored not just the technological innovation, but how strategic deployment of AI makes business more efficient, agile, and competitive—particularly for wholesalers and independent retailers navigating an increasingly complex environment.
A New Era Defined by AI
Tye Walker opened the discussion by referencing a quote from a prior conference where a CEO listed three major forces shaping retail: price inflation, global conflict, and generative AI. While the first two pose external threats, the CEO argued, it’s AI—particularly the emergence of generative and agentic AI—that represents a genuine opportunity for retailers to adapt, innovate, and thrive.
SymphonyAI has been at the forefront of this movement for 30 years, harnessing technology to evolve retail operations, focusing heavily on AI for the past decade. The company’s journey, Tye Walker explained, began with labor-intensive data analysis, progressed to advanced business intelligence, and now, thanks to generative models like ChatGPT, has reached a new level—delivering actionable, in-the-moment insights as well as automating responses and recommendations through AI “agents.”
Metcash: AI at Work for Australia’s Independent Retailers
For Young and Metcash, the largest wholesaler in the Australian and New Zealand market, the value proposition of AI is how it can help independent retailers be more successful. With operations covering food, liquor, and hardware, Metcash services thousands of supermarkets (notably under the IGA brand), as well as cafes and convenience stores across an immense, logistically challenging geography, Young noted.
Metcash’s core mission is to help independent businesses thrive against major chains. The unique challenge is that these stores are all independently owned—often by families—so Metcash acts as a partner, providing centralized buying power, promotional programs, and, increasingly, advanced technology solutions, such as those provided by SymphonyAI.
When Metcash helps its customers grow it grows, but many of the retailers it serves are stretched thin; they can’t afford the luxury of dedicated data analysts or high-end technology. AI is helping to level the playing field, democratizing data and insight so that even the smallest operator can make data-driven decisions previously only accessible to the big players.
Turning complexity into competitive advantage
Metcash’s network is incredibly complex—ranging from small 2,000-sq.-ft. supermarkets to corner cafes, spread across urban and remote rural areas. Serving such diversity means handling vast, disparate streams of data—sales, promotions, pricing, inventory, and more—each potentially siloed.
Here’s where SymphonyAI’s technology is transformative. The company’s connected data platform applies layers of AI, from descriptive and diagnostic analytics to predictive and prescriptive processes, and now, generative AI. This means “Monday morning” sales meetings, once filled with finger-pointing and endless debate about what happened and why, are now streamlined. Tye Walker shared that SymphonyAI’s global clients have seen up to a 75% reduction in time spent on analytics and reporting.
Through SymphonyAI, Metcash category managers can now quickly see not just what happened, but why, who was affected, and—most importantly—what to do next. AI-generated dashboards surface insights from multiple data sources, crunching what would have been hours of manual work into moments. For example, generative AI can instantly summarize out-of-stock issues, propose actions, or highlight anomalies—surfacing “unknown unknowns” that might have escaped even an experienced analyst. Managers can focus on action and collaboration, rather than being bogged down in spreadsheets.
Automated agents: The next frontier
Looking ahead, Tye Walker described SymphonyAI’s move toward “agentic AI”—autonomous systems that not only analyze data, but proactively generate recommendations, automate reports, and even trigger operational actions (like updating shelf labels in response to stockouts) at any hour, freeing up human capacity.
This shift is especially valuable for retail’s unique, high-frequency, store-level decisions. For Metcash’s far-flung, independent stores, tailored planograms and space optimization recommendations can now be dynamically generated and delivered, accounting for local context—like whether a store is six hours from the next supermarket or located in a tourist hotspot.
Managing change and unlocking value
Metcash’s Young was candid about challenges such as how enabling tailored, granular decisions at scale isn’t feasible manually. The key to success, she stressed, is anchoring the technology in clear principles: make it simple, support efficiency, and empower independent retailers and their teams.
Metcash started with the basics: consolidating core data, ensuring accuracy, and providing actionable insights. For example, identifying whether a poor promotion was due to effectiveness issues or a distribution problem used to require multiple reports; now, AI triangulates this in real time. Over time, the roadmap extends to personalization—targeting behavior by store type and customer profile, and providing flexible, store-level category strategies.
The ultimate goal is to empower independent stores with tools that let them make the right choices for their business—and then learn systemically what works and what doesn’t, feeding the insights back into continuous improvement.
This is a competitive imperative, because as Tye Walker noted, an “arms race” is underway for AI-enabled retail. Winners will be those who not only adopt technology early but integrate it deeply and strategically turning intelligence into action, and complexity into competitive strength. Those are the things Metcash is doing today to bolster the competitiveness of the independent retailers it serves throughout Australia and New Zealand.
