The Wholesale Group, the enlarged buying group formed at the start of the year by combining Confex and Fairway Foodservice, has claimed that it is leading the industry with its latest technology innovation, which will be “transformational for its members, supplier partners and team”.
At its conference in Tenerife earlier this month, the group revealed how its ‘Jake by ShopAI’, believed to be the world’s first email-native business intelligence platform with ephemeral analytical workspaces, can transform email inboxes into analytical environments without the need to install software.
Explaining the rationale for the development, Tom Gittins, the group’s Joint Managing Director, said: “We recognised that teams can spend their entire day on email, but when using traditional business intelligence tools, they have to access data via separate platforms, which creates friction and reduces adoption.
“With Jake, however, members can now email questions about their purchasing patterns, supplier pricing comparisons or trading opportunities and receive instant analysis in the same thread.
“When we introduced this to our members, they immediately grasped how this would transform their daily workflow. Instead of accessing dashboards, they can have conversations with their data.”
The innovation is now being deployed across the group to provide members, suppliers and staff with unified access to business intelligence through email, web and video conferencing.
Gittins continued: “For a wholesaler managing complex supplier relationships and category decisions, this represents a significant operational advantage. I’m delighted that The Wholesale Group now has these analytical capabilities through email, which I believe will lead the entire industry forward.”
ShopAI CEO Ilann Hepworth explained why Jake is such a step forward: “The ephemeral analytical workspace concept, which creates temporary, thread-isolated computational environments within email, represents a fundamentally different approach to business intelligence.
“What makes The Wholesale Group’s deployment significant is the real-world complexity: 255+ member organisations, locked corporate devices, mobile workforce requirements and integration with multiple database systems. This isn’t just technically viable, but commercially invaluable at scale.
“We have searched extensively and found no platforms globally offering similar capabilities, which positions The Wholesale Group as the pioneering organisation validating a new category of business technology.”
NAM Implications:
- Positive results will drive adoption.
- Fast, being wholesale…
- i.e. ‘Try it and see’.
- (and share experiences…)
