Partner POV | Drive retail profits and productivity with HPE Private Cloud AI

Enter the age of smart retail

Artificial intelligence (AI) is empowering retailers everywhere to solve the greatest challenges in their industry. Keeping pace with customer expectations as well as escalating competition makes it critical to work quickly and effectively to drive profits and ensure customer satisfaction. With AI, retailers can turn data into actionable insights and competitive advantages. Retailers that invest in AI have the ability to predict trends, identify issues that impact profit margins, and rapidly respond to demand. In fact, AI-enabled solutions can boost profits by 3x. But AI adoption comes with its own challenges. Retailers need an end-to-end strategy to simplify the use of AI and determine where it will have the greatest impact.

Implementing AI technologies has enabled retailers to develop innovative new methods for engaging customers and streamlining critical operations. As retail continues to create intelligent stores and harness disparate data streams, AI has emerged as the vehicle that allows retailers to drive efficiency and innovation.

These four AI use cases can boost retail profits and customer loyalty:

• Customer service chatbots: Enhance customer experiences with chatbots curated to guide shoppers throughout their journeys. AI chatbots provide conversational support (beyond automated responses) to interpret and respond to queries, providing broader and more personalized support for improved customer satisfaction.
• Demand forecasting and inventory management: Optimize inventory management systems using AI for demand forecasting. AI analyzes historical sales data, buying trends, and other market factors to predict future for products with a high degree of accuracy, so retailers can set target inventory levels and adjust as needed across locations.
• Dynamic pricing: Maximize revenue with a dynamic pricing strategy that rapidly adjusts product costs to enhance sell-through, maintain optimal inventory levels, and increase margins without deterring customers. AI algorithms synthesize insights from transactional, customer, competitor, and market data to automatically adjust pricing to boost retail profits in a sustainable manner.
• Theft prevention: Use AI to support advanced surveillance and asset protection to enhance strategies for in-store loss prevention as well as fraud detection. AI algorithms use video and transactional point-of-sale data to track unusual behavior and detect anomalies that indicate possible theft, and systems issue real time alerts to store employees to intervene.

By using AI for strategic use cases, retailers have the ability to improve customer satisfaction, increase productivity while reducing risk, and provide seamless shopping experiences. These applications are just the beginning.

Improve consumer and inventory insights

The question for many retailers is, how do I implement AI and apply it to my key use cases? To unlock the full value of AI, retailers need a holistic approach that encompasses operational goals and ethical considerations. This type of approach means thinking about how AI can deliver against business targets overall as well as what resources are required across the AI lifecycle. The right strategy can help retailers of every size utilize AI technologies for inference, utilizing large language models (LLMs), to advanced techniques such as fine-tuning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

A private cloud for AI is the solution retailers have waiting for—a comprehensive offering that can bring deeper insights to their fingertips and deliver real-world value. Retailers are increasingly embracing a hybrid cloud approach to AI with data privacy and control as key factors. Public cloud solutions (while feature-rich) can expose data and models to threats, with potentially significant consequences to IP. This is driving retailers to private cloud solutions with self-hosted open-source models to save time/resources, enhance data visibility, and increase flexibility.

A full-stack private cloud simplifies the management of fragmented technologies and boosts the productivity of AI users. This turnkey solution, known as HPE Private Cloud AI (PCAI), is designed to harness all available data for real time insights, automation, and acceleration.

Retailers are already leveraging a private cloud solution for AI to optimize each stage of their operations, enable smarter decisions, improve logistics, and enhance security.

Why HPE Private Cloud AI?

HPE and NVIDIA® are on a mission to make AI more attainable, user-friendly, and cost-effective. Today, retailers around the globe are adopting our proven and tested solutions to work faster and smarter—not harder.

HPE PCAI is the engine powering these new value streams in your retail operations. HPE PCAI is the first co-engineered solution to come from NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE—a new joint initiative that helps businesses succeed with AI by transforming how they think, work, and make decisions. NVIDIA AI Computing (or HPE PCAI with NVIDIA) includes AI-optimized infrastructure, networking, software, and foundation models that accelerate the entire AI workflow, so projects reach production faster with higher accuracy, efficiency, and infrastructure performance at a lower overall cost. This private cloud solution is designed for inference, RAG, and fine-tuning use cases offering a cloud-based experience. Our approach to AI simplifies IT complexity, boosts retail productivity, and speeds time to value—while keeping your data private, secure, and under complete control of enterprise IT.

HPE PCAI can scale easily with the growth and utilization of AI use cases, so you can focus less on updating infrastructure and more on gaining value. This is where HPE GreenLake comes in. HPE GreenLake cloud offers a self-service experience via a single platform. Retailers have access to a portfolio of cloud services to automate, orchestrate, and manage users and data across hybrid environments. Start as small as a single AI pilot and evolve quickly for multiple use cases in one solution. Plus, you can manage workloads either on-prem, colocation, or in the cloud. Unlike full-stack AI solutions based on reference architectures that can take months to plan, build, and deploy, HPE PCAI is ready to use out of the box.

Accelerate AI Success with HPE and NVIDIA solutions

What sets HPE and NVIDIA apart? We bring a fully curated private cloud for AI solution that makes adoption simple and turnkey. Retailers benefit from purpose-built infrastructure combined with the ideal tools for each stage of AI development, including a library of models that are most applicable to your business. You can access and manage each of these offerings through a common experience and user interface. This flagship offering from NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE is making the path to AI productivity more streamlined than ever before.

HPE PCAI features NVIDIA AI computing, networking, and software with robust HPE ProLiant Gen11 inferencing servers, HPE AI storage, and the HPE GreenLake cloud to provide retailers the performance and flexibility to deploy the most impactful AI applications.

AI-optimized hardware is available as a single rack in small or medium configurations. Small configurations are ideal for basic LLM inference (e.g., customer service chatbots), while medium configurations can support RAG for LLMs (e.g., personalized product recommendations). Large multi-rack configurations are also available, capable of fine-tuning the most complex models (e.g., real time theft prevention).

At the software layer, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and a specialized set of user-friendly tools are available to help manage your AI needs—today and in the long-term. For retailers that are just getting started, HPE AI Essentials Software provides a curated set of tools to expedite data pipelines and your AI use cases. Integration with NVIDIA NIM inference microservices helps you create data pipelines, develop and fine-tune your models, and deploy AI use cases quickly.

Prepare retail operations for the future

AI holds immense potential for the future of retail. HPE and NVIDIA are delivering breakthrough solutions that overcome the challenges of AI and help retailers utilize more of their data for greater impact with less risk. HPE PCAI is the answer to make all this possible. Through pre-testing and optimization, our solution makes it simple to adopt and scale AI, improve productivity across retail locations, and keep your data secure.

Wherever you are on your journey, HPE and NVIDIA are committed to your success. HPE AI Services are available globally to accelerate AI innovation. Engage with our experts for an advisory session. We will create a road map with you to launch and manage your AI environment—including technology selection, proof of concepts, and deployment. We can even manage the entire solution on your behalf.

Let's push the boundaries of retail technology. Discover how a private cloud approach for AI can help you disrupt and lead the industry.