B&Q and Screwfix owner Kingfisher taps GenAI as it builds data led omnichannel customer experience

Kingfisher, the owner of B&Q and Screwfix, yesterday announced full year results for FY23/24, with Tom Betts, Group Data Director, taking to social media to flag up progress being made on his side of the business.

In a LinkedIn post, he said: “Respect and congratulations to all teams contributing to these results. I am proud of the huge progress we've made together on building data capabilities as we "build a data led customer experience" under the Powered by Kingfisher strategy.”

He added: “We're using data and AI to drive top-line growth, streamline operations, strengthen margins and generate new income streams. This has required substantial collaboration between business, tech and data teams across group and our retail banners.”

Kingfisher also owns DIY stores in France, Poland, Spain and Portugal under the Castorama and Brico Dépôt brands.

Highlights from the last 12 months include:

Developing in-house algorithms for product recommendations and personalisation and implementing them at Screwfix, B&Q, Castorama and Brico Depot Romania. These are driving >100% improvement vs. previous solutions and at B&Q are now powering c. 10% of e-commerce sales, according to Betts.

He also highlighted how Kingfisher is enabling transparency over its supply chain with an end-to-end visibility tool.

This provides teams with rich and timely data to take action to reduce inventory levels and shorten replenishment cycles, resulting in better product availability for customers. It is now available in all markets.

Other highlights:

Deploying new AI enabled tools to optimise promotions and pricing at B&Q.

These enable commercial teams to forecast promotional performance and assess the best promotional mechanics by simulating different scenarios.

“We're also applying AI to optimise clearance pricing in-store and online. These are contributing to improved sales growth, better sell-through and stronger margins,” Betts said.

Strengthening sales demand forecasting capabilities with machine learning at Castorama France. These are driving substantial improvements in forecast accuracy and efficiency.

Generating new retail media income streams from vendors who want to purchase advertising and use data to improve their offering. “We've launched propositions for Castorama France, Brico Dépôt, and B&Q. Revenue has the potential to reach 3% of total Group e-commerce sales.”

Finally, building Athena - an in-house orchestration framework allowing Kingfisher to integrate and manage multiple GenAI tools quickly and safely.

Betts concluded: “Athena allowed us to launch our first customer facing GenAI product - a virtual assistant "Hello Casto". We'll have more to share soon. All of these use cases are powered by our group wide data platform Nucleus which is providing simpler and faster access to data.”