Lakehouse for Retail

Power real-time decisions with data. The Lakehouse for Retail enables companies to both rapidly ingest data at scale and make insights available across the value chain in real time. Speed is the antidote to business volatility, and companies are using the Lakehouse to power real-time operations with data.

The Lakehouse for Retail delivers on the promise of real-time data, with the maturity that businesses demand from modern data platforms. Delta Lake simplifies the change data capture process while providing ACID transactions, scalable metadata handling, and unified streaming and batch data processing. Delta Lake also supports versioning, enables rollbacks, full historical audit trails, and reproducible machine learning experiments.

Improve the accuracy of decisions. The Lakehouse uses technologies to scale analysis, enabling companies to perform the largest analytics while meeting service windows. Companies no longer need to sacrifice accuracy or breadth of analysis to meet service levels. The Lakehouse allows companies to scale their analytics to the largest of jobs and deliver highly accurate analytics while meeting operational needs by using all types of data.

Use all types of data. Only 5%–10% of a company’s data is structured. Tapping into the other 90% of data helps businesses better understand the environment around them, and make better decisions. The Lakehouse for Retail has native support for all types of data, structured and unstructured like images and video, which allows companies to make better-informed decisions.

Inexpensive and open collaboration. Retailers need to collaborate with their partners in real time, but existing data sharing technologies are expensive and often require that all parties invest in the same proprietary technology. The Lakehouse for Retail leverages Delta Sharing to provide an open and secure method of data collaboration and sharing for companies. This inexpensive approach unlocks the power of collaboration with all partners in the value chain.

Retail and Consumer Goods companies heavily utilize third-party data and partners across a tightly integrated value chain. The challenge? It’s time consuming and expensive to bring in new data sets and partners.

Databricks Marketplace, underpinned by the powerful capabilities of Delta Sharing, streamlines this and enables customers to quickly integrate new data in their environment in a period of hours and days. They can also leverage new models, apps and even share data with other partners via secure data clean rooms.

• Integrate point-of-sale and external causal data from partners
• Leverage data clean rooms with Habu and LiveRamp
• Quickly leverage data from the customer tenant with third-party apps
• Tuck in new functionality from point solutions such as Helios

The impact of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) on society is growing by the day. Within the retail industry, practical applications for innovations such as ChatGPT and Dolly are widespread — including the rapid search of large product catalogs, streamlining customer service with intelligent chatbots, analyzing customer data and sentiments for personalization and more — all with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and sales.

The fuel that makes an LLM run effectively is high-quality data, and lots of it. Databricks Lakehouse for Retail provides the underlying architecture and tooling to harness customer and operational data to easily deliver generative AI and LLM models to the entire organization. With a unified platform for all data types — structured, semi-structured and unstructured — the Lakehouse enables retailers to power their AI initiatives with all the data necessary.

On top of the unified platform Databricks provides, we have developed free, purpose-built guides — fully functional notebooks and best practices — that speed up results across the most common and high-impact retail and consumer goods use cases. Check out our Large Language Models for Retail Solution Accelerators to get started today.