Shekar Raman, co-founder and CEO of Birdzi, explains why the biggest opportunity in grocery retail isn’t more data, it’s finally connecting the data grocers already have.
Here’s a stat that stopped me mid-sentence during this conversation: at most grocery retailers, the top 20% of shoppers generate 65% to 70% of total revenue. That means the single most important thing a grocer can do isn’t acquiring new shoppers. It’s making sure the shoppers they already have don’t leave. And according to Shekar Raman, most grocery chains are still flying blind on exactly who those shoppers are.
Shekar is the co-founder and CEO of Birdzi, a company that helps supermarkets turn shopper data into one-to-one personalization at scale. His origin story is one of my favorites we’ve had on the show. He’s an electrical engineer who cut his teeth on the Human Genome Project and then in speech recognition at Bell Labs, nowhere near grocery retail. Then his daughter needed help with an invention-day project, they got lost in a supermarket looking for items on a list, and she asked why nobody had built something to help shoppers find products in the store. That idea became Birdzi. The company doesn’t do wayfinding anymore, but the instinct that started it, that grocery shopping had become anonymous and frustrating, turned out to be the whole business.
What Does AI-Driven Personalization Actually Look Like in Grocery Retail?
Shekar’s framing of this stuck with me: for most of retail history, the corner store owner knew you by name, knew your kids, and knew what you liked. Then supermarkets scaled up to 20-aisle stores where you drove in, grabbed your own cart, and checked out without a single human interaction. The personal relationship disappeared, but the data that could replace it was sitting right there in loyalty programs, nobody was using it well.
That’s the gap Birdzi is closing. The platform, called Whisper, uses first-party shopper data to run one-to-one personalization that used to take a team of five or six people four to eight weeks, and now takes a couple of hours. The results are the kind of numbers that make you sit up: 55% engagement rates on targeted audiences, basket increases of 17% to 30% per trip, retention metrics up 50% to 60%, and customer retention as high as 89%. Email engagement in particular surprised him.
“We’re seeing incredible engagement on the email front where people are now habituated and looking for these personalized emails which have their deals for the week or the deals for the month.”
— Shekar Raman, Co-founder and CEO, Birdzi
Why Are Data Silos Grocery Retail’s Biggest Blind Spot?
If personalization is the opportunity, data silos are what’s blocking most retailers from getting there. Shekar described grocery retail as a uniquely siloed business: marketing, merchandising, supply chain, and logistics all run as separate departments with separate systems, and because it’s a 24/7/365 business, nobody has time to step back and connect the dots. Legacy applications made it worse by locking data into proprietary formats.
“If your data isn’t in a place where it can be used by AI, AI is not going to do much for you.”
— Shekar Raman, Co-founder and CEO, Birdzi
This is exactly the problem we talk about constantly on this show, and it’s not unique to grocery. The bigger the company, the more convinced they are they “have all this data,” and the less usable it actually is. Birdzi’s answer is building a unified data lake and warehouse on top of the retailer’s feeds, so AI has something coherent to work with instead of a dozen disconnected systems.
“It’s almost like having the brain and the eyes and the hands all now connected in one body. They used to be all separate in different places, and now you can act in more cohesion and achieve a goal. I think today it’s not just about insights, it’s about action.”
— Shekar Raman, Co-founder and CEO, Birdzi
What Does Loyalty Actually Mean When Trust Is the Currency?
This is the section I’d bookmark if I were a marketer at any retailer, not just grocery. Shekar’s take on loyalty programs cuts right past the points-and-tiers mechanics most brands still lean on.
“Loyalty is something that you earn, and the real currency for loyalty is trust. I’ve been shopping with a store for 5 years, and if I’m still getting offers for Oreo cookies, and I’ve been on a sugar-free diet for 4 years, what’s that telling me about how much my supermarket understands me?”
— Shekar Raman, Co-founder and CEO, Birdzi
To make that measurable, Birdzi built what Shekar calls a KIC score, essentially a FICO score for shopper loyalty, adjusted for life stage. A family of three spending less than a retired couple isn’t necessarily less loyal, it’s a different baseline entirely. Retailers using this approach are seeing triple-digit increases in retention in some cases, a 16% to 20% increase in trips per month, and a 23% increase in spend per month. The mechanism behind all of it is trust, not discounts.
Where Is This Headed: Agentic Commerce and the Next 12 Months
I always ask guests to look ahead, and Shekar didn’t hedge. He thinks a lot of what feels speculative today, a unified “central brain” running enterprise operations, guardrailed AI agents taking action instead of just producing dashboards, is 6 months to a year away, not 5 to 10 years. But he pushed back on one piece of AI hype specifically: agentic commerce fully replacing human purchase decisions.
“People like to be involved in decisions when it comes to buying stuff. The agents may execute it on their behalf, but they still want to decide what’s to be bought. It’s kind of like you’re going to have a pilot behind a plane even though it’s autopilot on it. There’s that last mile you still want control of.”
— Shekar Raman, Co-founder and CEO, Birdzi
That distinction matters. Automation is going to eat the mundane, repetitive parts of retail operations. What’s left, and what becomes more valuable, is human-to-human trust and judgment, which is exactly what personalization done right is supposed to protect in the first place.
The Bigger Picture
What I keep coming back to from this conversation is that grocery retail didn’t lose its personal touch because retailers stopped caring. It lost it because the format scaled faster than the tools to stay personal at that scale. Birdzi’s whole thesis is that AI finally closes that gap, not by replacing the relationship, but by giving retailers back the kind of shopper knowledge a corner store owner used to have naturally. That’s a pattern I’d bet shows up in every industry that scaled past the point where humans alone could track individual relationships. Get the data connected, get it into a system that can act on it, and you can rebuild the personal touch you thought you’d lost for good.
Connect with Shekar Raman on LinkedIn or learn more about Birdzi’s Customer Intelligence Platform at birdzi.com.
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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Watch the full episode: How Data and AI Are Reshaping Grocery Retail
