Shownotes
What if one of retail’s most valuable datasets has been hiding in plain sight? In this episode of the Greenbook Podcast, Karen Lynch sits down with Charlotte Kiddle and Yasmin Ayoub Sanusi of Vazen, formerly Virtual Store Trials, following their double win at IIEX Europe’s Insight Innovation Competition for both the Audience Favorite Award and Industry Impact Award.
Charlotte and Yasmin explain how Vazen transforms planogram, transactional, store, and shopper-related data into practical intelligence for brands and category teams. They explore how AI can make years of shelf data easier to query, reduce range-review analysis from days to hours, and reveal opportunities for assortment, innovation, and shelf optimization. The conversation also examines changing retail dynamics, cross-functional decision-making, and why the next phase of AI in insights will be defined less by hype and more by practical impact.
Key Discussion Points
- Unlocking planogram data for better decisions: How Vazen makes complex shelf and retail data accessible to brands, category managers, and insights teams.
- Turning AI into a practical retail tool: Why reliable, standardized data matters more than AI hype—and how Ask Vazen enables teams to query retail data in plain language.
- Reducing range-review analysis from days to hours: How AI-assisted analysis can quickly identify assortment changes, delistings, share-of-shelf shifts, and potential sales impact.
- Responding to a changing retail environment: How range reductions, premiumization, retail media, and a shift from category-based to occasion-based merchandising are changing shelf strategy.
- Connecting insights, category, and brand teams: Why better access to shared data can help organizations make stronger cross-functional recommendations—and ultimately influence what happens in-store.
Resources & Links
You can reach out to Charlotte Kiddle and Yasmine Ayoub Sanusi on LinkedIn.
Many thanks to Charlotte Kiddle and Yasmine Ayoub Sanusi for being our guests. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.
