This interview is part of our new AI in Retail series, where we interview the world's top thought leaders on the front lines of the intersections between AI and retail.

In this interview, we speak with Griffin Morris, VP of Product at Spatial.ai, to understand how his company is using AI to transform retail, and what the future of the retail industry holds.

1. What’s the story behind Spatial.ai? Why and how did you begin?

GM: Lyden Foust, our CEO, was an ethnographer, studying the personalities and emotions of communities as a researcher for some of the world's largest consumer goods companies. He knew there must be a way to democratize these insights with data science and artificial intelligence. Spatial.ai was founded to capture and analyze the billions of data points of location-based social media (Geosocial) data in order to deliver powerful insights in a scalable, statistically significant way.

2. Please describe your use case and how Spatial.ai uses artificial intelligence:

GM: Spatial.ai uses artificial intelligence to extract meaningful business insights from massive datasets of natural conversations (Geosocial data). The resulting Social Segmentation system can then be compared to business performance, again using AI, to determine where geographically businesses can earn more revenue, avoid risk, and better understand their customers.

3. Could you share a specific customer/user that benefits from what you offer? What has your service done for them?

GM: Through Spatial.ai's direct relationships with major retailers and our industry-leading partners, companies operating over 45,000 physical locations use Spatial.ai's Geosocial data to predict sales performance of new locations during the site selection process. Often improving their estimates by over 25  percent.