2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Best Data Analytics Driven Retail Initiative finalists announced
We’re pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Best Data Analytics Driven Retail Initiative category. We received a record number of entries this year and many fantastic examples of technology excellence driving transformative change across the global retail sector.
Check out a rundown of our 2026 shortlists and finalists here.
Congratulations to all those who made it through the initial submission process! It’s now over to our star studded judging panel who will decide the winners to be announced at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London.
The event will be held on Wednesday, 4th November and consist of a drinks reception, three course meal, awards ceremony presided over by award winning stand-up comedian, presenter, actor and broadcaster, Aurie Styla, and after party until 1am.
Click here to book your place at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, 4th November.
Our 2026 Best Data Analytics Driven Retail Initiative finalists as follows:
Circana
Circana's data science team built Demand Forecaster, a self-correcting forecasting system run as a two-level tournament. Demand drivers compete for a place in each model, then forecasting methods compete to project each driver, with every round decided by explicit, auditable rules.
Built in Circana Unify+, it forecasts in each retailer's own hierarchy, from total store to SKU/UPC, across edible, non-edible and general merchandise. Retailers progress from ad hoc projects to annual contracts, multi-year agreements and direct tool access. Multiple retailers are now signed up for multi-year engagements, and adoption has grown from a handful to many of the world's largest.
Datitude
Retail data is fragmented by design. Tech stacks built around systems/tools, each with its own version of the truth. Datitude's unified retail data platform solves that problem at source. Five connected layers integrate, clean, model, define and surface data, giving every team access to the same trusted numbers through Datitude's Application, Excel Add-in, BI tools, data feeds and now, AI.
New this year is a Semantic Layer and AI Gateway, extending the governed foundation for advanced analytics to AI. One platform connecting, integrating and unifying data. More data, more use cases, more ways to access it. Better, trusted intelligence.
EE Retail
Own Your Town transforms complex customer, commercial, geographic and retail data into actionable local intelligence. By connecting previously separate datasets, every EE store can understand the size of the opportunity within its catchment, how much it is capturing and where future growth lies.
Instead of simply reporting past performance, the initiative gives store leaders clear insight into where to focus their teams next. The result is a powerful connection between national growth strategy and frontline action, supporting EE's ambition to grow broadband net additions and already contributing to increased local ownership and market share. It shifts retail analytics from explaining yesterday to shaping tomorrow.
Focal Systems and Village Super Market
An empty shelf often isn't a true out-of-stock. The product is in a case overhead, and the store's systems can't say where. Focal Systems' Top Stock, launched in August 2026, closes that gap with data the store already collects.
Cameras installed in the store read coded labels on overhead cases every hour. Focal matches what they see against the store's inventory records and the gaps on the shelf below, then turns each match into a restocking task. In its first month at Village Super Market's ShopRite, Top Stock found $24,000 of inventory the store owned but couldn't see.
Footasylum and invent.ai
As Footasylum strategically expanded its UK bricks and mortar network, growing complexity across forecasting, demand planning and inter-branch transfers was creating operational inefficiencies and impacting product availability.
The retailer partnered with invent.ai to overhaul its forecasting and inventory processes, replacing manual inventory rules with automated, data driven decisioning. Invent.ai’s AI decisioning platform turns retail data into automated decisions and actions, enabling Footasylum to forecast demand more accurately and automatically execute optimal inventory decisions at SKU and store level.
HyperFinity and JD Sports
Personalisation is easy to promise and hard to prove. JD Sports wanted proof before committing further budget to a loyalty programme. So HyperFinity built it a centralised personalisation engine and ran three controlled trials: category offers, spend-based incentives, cross-sell mechanics. Each trial answered one question at a time.
The result: a 3.2% uplift in in-store loyalty sales, plus dashboards, segmentations and campaign templates JD's team now run themselves. The learnings are now shaping how JD evolves its personalisation strategy.
MRI Software and Sky
Sky partnered with MRI Software to transform how it measures customer engagement across its retail estate, particularly its mid-mall concessions where traditional footfall metrics fall short.
Using MRI’s footfall analytics solution, Sky can capture visitor volumes, movement and engagement around these open retail environments, creating a 360-degree view of customer behaviour. The initiative turns previously difficult-to-measure interactions into actionable intelligence, enabling Sky to compare performance across different retail formats and better understand demand and conversion.
Quorso and Currys
Currys operates 296 stores across the UK and Ireland, and like most large format retailers, it had more data than its store teams could act on. Reports arrived across multiple platforms and took hours each week to work through.
Regional averages also hid what each store actually needed. Working with Quorso, Currys launched Action AI. It unifies data from every source, in whatever format it arrives, and analyses each store individually to surface the specific actions most likely to move its numbers.
A focused proof of concept on sales and customer satisfaction delivered uplift on both, including a £20-40 million sales uplift in the first year. Action AI achieved 100% General Manager engagement from day one and has reallocated around five hours per store per week from reporting to the shop floor.
Retail Express
Retail Express partnered with a leading regional UK convenience store operator (240+ stores, £147 million+ 12-week turnover) to transform how raw transaction, margin, and competitor pricing data is unified and acted upon.
Leveraging the Retail Express Intelligent Merchandising platform, the initiative deployed AI driven volumetric product analytics (ABC classification), granular store demographic profiling, and competitor price matching. By replacing fragmented, manual systems with algorithmic rules-based pricing, the platform enables real-time decision-making, unlocking a £3.98 million annualised profit opportunity (+100 bps margin expansion) while sharpening customer price perception on essential everyday items.
Vusion and Kavanagh
Vusion360 brings together the full suite of Vusion’s technologies, transforming the store into a fully connected, intelligent and data driven ecosystem.
Electronic shelf labels, EdgeSense, Captana, Pulse, VusionLive and VusionCloud each work in tandem to turn data from across the store into practical and actionable insights for retailers. The system enables prices and promotions to be updated in real-time, constant shelf monitoring and expiry management, and the ability to communicate and display a wealth of product information right at the shelf edge.
Kavanagh’s Belsize Park became the UK’s first store to be fully equipped with Vusion360. The initiative connects and analyses store data, enabling Kavanagh’s to identify and resolve issues faster and make better-informed decisions that improve operations and reduce waste, all while continuing to deliver a high quality shopping experience for their customers.
