Milestone as drugstore retailer BIPA takes wraps off Haidi AI powered store employees assistant

REWE Group owned BIPA, a drugstore retailer in Austria, has launched Haidi, an AI assistant for its employees.

In a LinkedIn post, Alexander Huber, Head of Digital Business Hub at REWE International, said: "Milestone reached! As the first company in Austria, we at BIPA together with the REWE International Cloud Team and Google Cloud, have developed a revolutionary AI assistant that makes internal knowledge accessible to all store employees."

"What makes Haidi special? Natural language input - questions like in a normal conversation; Multilingual - German, English, Turkish, Hungarian; Intelligent answers - No hit lists, but coherent solutions; Immediate help - From exchange processes to BIPA benefits; Data protection compliant - Secure on Google Cloud infrastructure."

He concluded: "What makes me particularly proud: the idea came from the team, the implementation was real co-creation. New colleagues in particular benefit enormously - Haidi democratises knowledge and makes it so much easier to get started. A big thank you to everyone who thought, tested and made possible."

RTIH AI in Retail Awards

RTIH, organiser of the industry leading RTIH Innovation Awards, proudly brings you the first edition of the RTIH AI in Retail Awards, which is now open for entries. 

Deadline for submissions is Friday, 5th December. It’s free to enter and you can do so across multiple categories.

As we witness a digital transformation revolution across all channels, AI tools are reshaping the omnichannel game, from personalising customer experiences to optimising inventory, uncovering insights into consumer behaviour, and enhancing the human element of retailers' businesses.

With 2025 set to be the year when AI and especially gen AI shake off the ‘heavily hyped’ tag and become embedded in retail business processes, our newly launched awards celebrate global technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world and the resulting benefits for retailers, shoppers and employees.

Our winners will be those companies who not only recognise the potential of AI, but also make it usable in everyday work - resulting in more efficiency and innovation in all areas.

Winners will be announced at an evening event at The Barbican in Central London on Thursday, 29th January.