NEW YORK, March 11, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Impact Analytics, the leader in AI-native solutions for retail planning, merchandising, pricing, and supply chain optimization, today announced the launch of CortexEye™, a new decision intelligence platform that enables retail leaders to ask complex questions of their enterprise data and receive clear, explainable answers about what is driving business performance.

They have released a whitepaper explaining the significance of this innovation to the market. Download here: LINK

“Retailers have invested heavily in data infrastructure, but the real challenge isn’t accessing data, it’s being able to ask meaningful questions of it and trust the answers,” said Prashant Agrawal, CEO and Founder of Impact Analytics and Professor of Retail AI & Advanced Analytics at Columbia Business School. “With CortexEye, leaders can ask questions like Why did this category decline despite higher marketing spend? or What factors are driving margin pressure this week? and receive a structured, explainable answer grounded in their own enterprise data. That ability to interrogate your data and quickly understand the ‘so what’ fundamentally changes how decisions get made.”

Despite major investments in modern data platforms and dashboards, many retailers still struggle to understand the underlying causes of performance shifts. Pricing changes, promotional activity, inventory flows, competitive moves, store execution, and external signals such as weather often interact simultaneously across the enterprise. While traditional analytics systems can show what changed, they rarely explain why it changed, or what to do next.

CortexEye addresses this gap by introducing an embedded reasoning layer that evaluates signals across merchandising, marketing, pricing, supply chain, store operations, and external drivers together. Built on Agentic AI and retail-native knowledge graphs, the platform allows organizations to move from monitoring metrics to understanding the causal drivers behind them.

Solving the Structural Limits of Retail Analytics

Most analytics architectures were designed to monitor performance within functional domains, such as merchandising, marketing, pricing, or supply chain. While these systems effectively surface KPI changes, determining the drivers behind those changes often requires manual cross-domain analysis and coordination between teams.

As described in the CortexEye whitepaper, retail organizations increasingly spend significant time stitching together insights across systems before a clear explanation emerges.

CortexEye embeds cross-domain reasoning directly into the analytics layer, enabling organizations to evaluate how multiple drivers interact in real time.

Key Capabilities of CortexEye

CortexEye introduces a retail-native decision intelligence stack designed for enterprise reliability and governance. Key capabilities include:

• 97% conversational AI accuracy across governed retail use cases
• Up to 50% time savings in investigative workflows through automated cross-domain diagnostics
• Embedded reasoning layer across existing data platforms and dashboards, eliminating the need for heavy system re-architecture
• Decision intelligence powered by Agentic AI, evaluating merchandising, marketing, pricing, supply, store, and external signals together
• Retail-native semantic models and knowledge graphs encoding product hierarchies, KPIs, and relationships across the business
• Governed multi-agent reasoning, where specialized agents analyze different retail domains in parallel and synthesize explanations
• Explainable outputs with lineage, supporting evidence, and confidence indicators
  
  

The system federates data across POS systems, inventory platforms, pricing engines, ERP systems, campaign platforms, and external signals such as weather and competitive benchmarks. Instead of replacing existing infrastructure, CortexEye works as an intelligence layer on top of current retail systems, connecting and interpreting signals across the enterprise.

Moving From Monitoring to Understanding

CortexEye supports multiple levels of inquiry, from quick KPI summaries to deep investigative analysis.

For example, when a retailer asks why a category declined despite increased advertising investment, CortexEye can simultaneously evaluate campaign efficiency, SKU availability, competitor discounting, regional demand patterns, store traffic dynamics, and weather signals. Rather than presenting separate dashboards, the platform connects these signals into a single, explainable narrative.

This capability significantly accelerates time-to-understanding. Organizations using automated cross-domain diagnostics report up to 50% faster investigative workflows, allowing teams to move more quickly from observation to action.

Decision Intelligence as Core Retail Infrastructure

As generative and agentic AI technologies proliferate across enterprises, governance and explainability are becoming essential requirements for operational adoption. CortexEye addresses these concerns through semantic alignment, knowledge graphs, traceable data lineage, and policy-based reasoning constraints that anchor AI outputs in trusted enterprise data.

By embedding reasoning logic into the analytics architecture, CortexEye institutionalizes cross-domain expertise that has historically lived within individual analysts. This approach stabilizes decision quality, reduces coordination overhead, and scales enterprise intelligence without expanding headcount.

Learn More

Impact Analytics has released a new whitepaper, “CortexEye™: Embedding Decision Intelligence into Retail Operations,” which explores the structural limits of current analytics architectures and the emergence of decision intelligence as the next layer of enterprise retail technology.

Read the full whitepaper here:
https://www.impactanalytics.ai/white-papers/retail-decision-intelligence?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=pr&utm_campaign=cortexeye_whitepaper

About Impact Analytics

Impact Analytics delivers AI-native SaaS solutions and consulting services that help companies maximize profitability and customer satisfaction through deeper data insights and predictive analytics leveraging Agentic AI. With a fully integrated end-to-end platform for planning, forecasting, merchandising, pricing, and promotions, Impact Analytics empowers companies to make smarter decisions based on real-time insights, rather than relying on last year’s inputs to forecast and plan this year’s business. Powered by over one million machine learning models, Impact Analytics has been at the forefront of AI innovation for a decade, setting new benchmarks in forecasting, planning, and operational excellence across the retail, grocery, manufacturing, and CPG sectors. Recognized for innovation and growth by Fortune, Financial Times, Inc. 5000, and the RIS Leaderboard, Impact Analytics continues to lead the way in shaping the future of business intelligence. Think differently about AI and learn more at www.impactanalytics.ai.

For media inquiries:
Maggie Williams Dryden
Vice President, Global Head of Marketing
Email: maggie.dryden@impactanalytics.co