Inside Analytics Unite 2026: Where Retail and CPG Leaders Turned AI Talk into Action

Polestar Analytics was proud to be a Gold Sponsor at Analytics Unite 2026, held April 7–9 at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. The summit, presented by Consumer Goods Technology, brought together more than 200 senior executives, data leaders, and technology innovators from across the retail and CPG landscape. This year's theme — "Redefining the Possible" — cut straight to the point: stop experimenting, start scaling.

Here's what stood out.

Opening Keynote: Reckitt's Shelf AI in Action

The conference opened with Varun Kakaria, CIO of North America at Reckitt, walking through how the company used AI-powered collaboration with a major retail partner to fix shelf performance. Their out-of-stock prediction accuracy went from 20% to 75% in a matter of months.

His advice was practical — tailor strategies by archetype, avoid creating silos, and choose progress over perfection.

Workshops and Share Groups

From there, the agenda moved into sessions that tackled the mechanics of scaling AI across retail and CPG operations:

• Charu Pujari from Loblaw Companies and Sangeetha Chandru from EXL walked attendees through how AI can push past basic search into autonomous, personalized shopping experiences.


• The Cloverpop team explored how AI agents are now orchestrating decisions rather than just optimizing forecasts.


• Neelabh Pant from Cloudera shared real results — including a 2.3x sales lift driven by real-time personalization and hybrid data strategies.

Day Two: Hard Questions, Honest Answers

Bryan Gildenberg of Confluencer Commerce challenged the room on what profitable growth actually looks like when consumers are discovering products through entirely new interfaces. A panel featuring Saurabh Srivastava from Fractal, Indy Cho from Costco, and Meenakshi Ghoge from Mondelez International dug into the data readiness gap — the problem most companies would rather not talk about.

The consensus was clear: the models are ready, but the foundations underneath them often aren't. Organizations that get sequencing right (domain mapping, semantic layers, then platforms) are the ones pulling ahead.

Emily Nash from The Coca-Cola Company and BodyArmor, alongside a partner from GoSpotCheck by FORM, made a compelling case for field intelligence — using real-time in-store data to close the gap between what headquarters plans and what actually happens in the aisle.

On the Sponsor Floor

The exhibition area was busy throughout, with companies running live demos across agentic AI, revenue growth management, and consumer analytics. Sponsors included Fractal, WNS, EXL, Cloudera, Cloverpop, Softtek, Clootrack, C5i, MathCo, and Polestar Analytics.

Themes That Kept Coming Up

A few ideas surfaced again and again — in sessions, at topic tables, and in hallway conversations:

• Agentic AI has moved past the concept stage. Companies are building autonomous systems that act on data, not just surface it.


• Data readiness, not model sophistication, is the real bottleneck holding most organizations back.


• Execution keeps beating strategy. The biggest returns are coming from closing the last-mile gap between insight and action.


• Human-AI collaboration matters. Every session emphasized keeping people at the center while automating the repetitive work.


• Pilots without measurable outcomes don't survive budget scrutiny anymore. Scalable impact is the only currency that counts.

Analytics Unite remains one of the few events where retail and CPG technology leaders actually share what's working and what isn't. If you weren't there this year, it's worth putting 2027 on the calendar.