Walgreens & Algolia : for an IA-based customer experience

In the U.S.A., the drugstore retailer Walgreens (turnover of US$ 67.7 billion in the six months to February up by 5.4% year-on-year) has joined forces with the search engine specialist Algolia.

This technology is an API capable of automatically extracting website content, analysing customer intent behind keywords, generating artificial intelligence (AI) driven synonyms to provide users with more relevant search results. It also provides product recommendation to encourage future purchases.

Initially deployed on the Microsoft Azure platform, this service offers customers items that are available in nearby stores. Walgreens aims to increase omnichannel shopping experiences such as 30-minute click & collect. In the three months to the end of February, 3.9 million orders were picked up by same-day click & collect. 

According to Algolia’s C.E.O., Bernadette Nixon, “Our solution helps retailers achieve their click & collect objectives and compete with pure-players that deliver on D+1 or D+2 like Amazon”. 

Walgreens also wants to personalise navigation based on geolocation. “Imagine that your city has a flu epidemic,” she continued. “Thanks to geolocation data, the Internet user will see adapted search results such as flu vaccine, tests and box of tissues. This is based on data at a macro level, but also on their profile and personal preferences.” Algolia is valued at US$2.25 billion with more than 10,000 clients like Dior, Lacoste and Under Armour. 

Other search players include Yext (sales of US$355 million in 2021), Elasticsearch (which raised US$609 million in 2021 with clients such as Walmart and Audi,  Lucidworks Fusion (sales up 200% last year) and Google. For Walgreens, this partnership comes in the context of a “cloud or distributed computing” war, which is the second pillar of the infrastructure needed to generate operational data, used for competitive advantage. 

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