Exclusive: Accenture Takes Stake in Profitmind
Accenture has invested in Profitmind, a retail technology company that two years ago developed an agentic AI platform to help retailers automate decisions across pricing, inventory and planning.
The companies declined to specify the size of the investment, though it is believed to be a significant, minority, non-controlling stake.
The investment, made through Accenture Ventures, is geared to further expand Accenture’s existing data and AI capabilities in retail, “enabling clients to bridge the gap between insights and action.”
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The partnership also furthers the growth potential of Profitmind by providing it with a path to Accenture’s client base. Accenture has a global reach with more than 900 retail clients.
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“In retail, AI is reinventing how people shop, how businesses operate and how employees work,” said Jill Standish, Accenture’s global retail lead, in a statement. “Retailers are navigating relentless disruption, and nowhere is the impact more acute than in merchandising, often considered the heart and soul of retail. But executives are overwhelmed by massive amounts of data, reports and spreadsheets, leaving little time for effective decision-making. Profitmind bridges the gap between insight and action through AI. It mirrors how retailers run their businesses, connecting pricing, inventory, promotions, and assortment into clear, prioritized recommendations that can be trusted and executed with the faster response needed in an increasingly competitive field.”
“This partnership with Accenture is really about now scaling and taking the platform much broader,” said Dr. Mark Chrystal, co-founder and chief executive officer of Profitmind. “We’ve got about a dozen customers right now, ranging from $100 billion down to $20 million in size but now we’re ready to scale.”
He declined to specify the retail clients. “We think we were the first to develop an agentic platform, certainly for retail, and so we’ve been spending a lot of time testing, validating, making sure the platform works,” he said.
Before Profitmind, Chrystal worked for many years in retail, including as an executive at Rue 21, American Eagle Outfitters, David’s Bridal, and The Disney Store, serving in planning, marketing, technology, analytics, allocation, supply chain and e-commerce roles at different times.
“The software industry is really good at developing point solutions that do one thing, like price optimization, or replenishment, or allocation, or some very specific application. But it didn’t matter what solutions I brought to the retail teams because they inevitably ended up back in Excel spreadsheets to make their decisions,” said Chrystal.
“For 25 years I watched the same exact business process every single week, 52 weeks a year, where the business teams would manually go in and pull reports out of the systems. They would dump data onto Excel spreadsheets to try to create a rounded view of what’s happening in the business. They’d spend all day Monday, and some of Tuesday, preparing for an executive meeting to present their points of view on what’s happening and what actions to take, and then they would take some actions with limited confidence, wondering whether they were moving the needle on the business or not. It was always a big investment in time every week and highly inefficient.
“Retail is a team sport,” said Chrystal. “It should not be done in silos. When you change a promotion, it affects inventory. When you affect inventory, it affects prices. Merchandising changes affect marketing. You have to be together, around the table, having these conversations. You have to be looking at data and insights across the company, but software solutions are not set up that way. They’re set up in those silos to do one thing well. As I looked at that process, it felt like AI was getting to a point where it could actually replicate the work the teams were doing and actually get them out of that manual process and more into the decision-making chair.”
So Chrystal dropped out of retail about four years ago and went to Silicon Valley to partner with leaders in AI to build the Profitmind platform.
In a nutshell, here’s how Profitmind works. It gathers all the data in a business – sales performance, assortment info, promotional data, etc. – scrapes the websites of competitors gathering info on their assortments, prices, and other areas, and even reads their 10Ks and 8Ks. Or as Chrystal said, Profitmind “collects all the market data it can get its hands on. It will look at competitors, in terms of what they’re trying to do. It will examine data coming in. It models all of that. It finds the patterns. It learns how customers respond to products, prices and promotions. And then every week, when the business team comes in at eight o’clock in the morning on a Monday, it’s done all the analytics work for them. And it’s saying in prioritized order, ‘here are the actions you can take now to improve the performance of your business and capture opportunities with customers relative to price and assortment.’ And it actually explains why and what the impact on the business would be.”
Chrystal said Profitmind provides “a tool set that’s been missing in retail” and is an alternative to the many hours of manual labor retail teams put in, and can accelerate decision-making.
Asked if adopting the AI-powered Profitmind would lead to retail workers losing their jobs, Chrystal replied: “That’s not my intent. I’m a retailer. The only thing I’ve done for 30 years is try and make retailers more successful, and mostly working for them and now building software. What I see happening with this software is we are going to shift jobs. We’re going to need fewer people who are in these Excel spreadsheets every Monday and Tuesday, but those people are going to shift into focusing on products and execution and servicing customers better, and I think that’s a better use of time and resources.”
Profitmind is a private company with a few different owners including MVP, a venture capital fund in Pittsburgh; Lightscape Partners, which invests in early stage companies, and Carnegie Mellon, the university in Pittsburgh.
Accenture provides a range of services in such areas as strategy, operations, technology and digital.
“By teaming with Accenture, we are directly addressing the operational complexities retailers face across markets, channels and data systems,” said Chrystal, in his prepared statement. “After launching the first agentic platform for retail at NRF 2024, this partnership [with Accenture] allows us to bring that innovation to more global clients, delivering consistent solutions that increase agility and turn critical insights into tangible business outcomes.”
In another key development to help scale its business, Profitmind revealed earlier this week that it will be available in the Microsoft Marketplace, which is an online destination for businesses to buy cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents.
“Microsoft’s global reach, and its track record in business software give Profitmind a powerful foundation to scale fast,” Chrystal said earlier this week. “With Profitmind on the Microsoft Marketplace, enterprise retailers can adopt our agentic AI decision intelligence platform more easily and move from spreadsheets to profit-first recommendations faster.”
“Profitmind shows the real impact of agentic AI in merchandising—turning complex data into clear, prioritized actions that help retailers move faster,” Keith Mercier, vice president, worldwide retail & consumer goods industry, Microsoft, said in a statement. “Merchandising and inventory planning sit at the heart of every retail operation. By combining Profitmind’s intelligent automation with the power of Microsoft’s platforms, we’re helping retailers drive better decisions and streamline execution within their existing workflows.”
In the software industry, there is a high rate of attrition among startups. But with its new partnerships with Microsoft and Accenture, the two-year-old Profitmind gets a leg up.
This is the second investment in an AI company Accenture has made this week. It earlier revealed that it had acquired the U.K.-based AI company Faculty for an amount that valued the firm at more than $1 billion. Faculty, which was founded in 2014, employs more than 400 people and Accenture said the acquisition would help its customers “reinvent core and critical business processes” using AI.
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