Alex Ovcharov is the founder and CEO of Wayvee Analytics, a real-time buyer satisfaction and engagement monitoring answer for retail, and the co-founder of Sensemitter. He has in depth expertise in analysis, product growth, and buyer conduct evaluation, gained via his roles as Product Director at Shazam Jap Europe and thru his entrepreneurial ventures.
His skilled journey contains pioneering profitable augmented actuality (AR) campaigns at Shazam, and co-founding Sensemitter, a gaming expertise analytics firm. Impressed by a discovery in WiFi sensing, Alex and his staff of builders and former CERN physicists launched AI algorithms for emotional evaluation, resulting in Wayvee Analytics’s founding in Could 2023. This innovation in Emotion AI is about to rework how retailers acquire actionable insights on buyer satisfaction and engagement, delivered in real-time with out using cameras or surveys, all whereas respecting customers’ privateness.
What impressed the founding of Wayvee Analytics, and the way did your background with Shazam and Sensemitter contribute to this journey?
My experiences have formed what we do at Wayvee, specializing in emotion recognition. Throughout my time at Shazam Jap Europe, I launched the area’s first Augmented Actuality (AR) marketing campaign and noticed how facial expressions revealed emotional patterns. Main a analysis venture utilizing facial coding, I spotted many industries like retail had been taken with such expertise, although privateness and tech limitations had been main challenges.
Combining my background in neuroscience and product growth, I noticed the necessity for higher buyer understanding in offline environments, the place present instruments had been both sluggish in suggestions assortment or privateness invasive. This led us, together with ex-CERN physicists, to develop Wayvee’s Emotion AI, overcoming these challenges with a expertise that operates with radio waves, guaranteeing 100% buyer privateness and delivering insights in actual time.
Might you share extra concerning the discovery in WiFi sensing that sparked the creation of Wayvee?
In Could 2023, I got here throughout an article that basically piqued my curiosity – it was about Wi-Fi sensing for monitoring human motion. It described how Wi-Fi-based units might seize information on how folks transfer, and the way radio waves are extraordinarily delicate to those place modifications. That acquired me pondering — if radio waves can detect motion, why couldn’t additionally they seize coronary heart charge and respiratory? These are key indicators for understanding emotional states.
Along with Viacheslav Matiunin, Wayvee’s CTO and a physicist who led information evaluation for the LHCb experiment at CERN, and a bunch of researchers and neuroscientists, we constructed a prototype utilizing an everyday Wi-Fi router to check the thought. The staff engineered an algorithm that would detect respiratory and micro-movements utilizing simply Wi-Fi alerts, and we patented the expertise. This marked the start of growing our MVP and ultimately our personal {hardware} machine – Wayvee sensor.
Wayvee was launched out of stealth in 2024. Are you able to speak concerning the preliminary targets of the corporate and the way you envision remodeling the retail analytics panorama?
As a deep tech firm targeted on Emotion AI for the bodily world, we see numerous potential purposes for this expertise, from healthcare to sensible houses. Nevertheless, my expertise in customer-facing markets rapidly confirmed that retail had the best potential for impression. Retailers are consistently in search of methods to extend buyer satisfaction and methods to higher perceive their viewers, but they typically depend on outdated strategies that don’t present real-time insights or face privateness issues with private information assortment.
By way of our pilot stage, it’s develop into clear that retailers want actionable insights, not simply information. It’s not sufficient to easily determine sad clients — we assist clarify why and supply suggestions for rapid enchancment, holding clients glad within the second.
Wayvee makes use of a privacy-preserving sensor with no cameras. How does your expertise handle to seize physiological alerts like respiratory and coronary heart charge utilizing radio frequency (RF) waves?
For us, privateness is a giant deal, and that’s why we don’t depend on cameras. Сameras clearly can observe the place somebody is and what they’re doing, however decoding feelings will be difficult, particularly if the particular person’s place or angle throws it off. Are you able to think about what number of cameras it’s worthwhile to set up to have the ability to see an individual from completely different angles?
As an alternative, we use radio waves. The Wayvee sensor, put in on cabinets or different key places, emits radio alerts and captures them after they bounce again, carrying a spread of information — from respiratory and coronary heart charge to refined shifts like posture, strolling pace, and gestures. Our AI algorithms then course of this information and convert it into emotional insights, recognizing if an individual is indignant, joyful, impartial, and many others.
Are you able to clarify how the AI algorithm processes these physiological alerts and interprets them into actionable insights for retailers?
Wayvee units seize radio wave alerts, permitting our algorithms to determine objects and find folks. Our AI then analyzes their responses utilizing a skilled neural community primarily based on the arousal-valence mannequin, which assesses emotional depth and positivity.
We give attention to real-time emotional shifts relatively than general states, leveraging our in depth dataset to ascertain baselines for figuring out feelings like happiness, unhappiness or frustration. This information is shipped to a server that powers Wayvee, offering retailers with real-time analytics, together with Buyer Satisfaction (C-SAT), engagement metrics, and different insights. Retailers can generate customized studies and obtain alerts for buyer dissatisfaction, enabling rapid motion.
What makes your strategy to emotion AI, which relies on physiological alerts like HRV and physique gestures, simpler than conventional strategies like surveys or video surveillance?
We carry all the pieces collectively in a single answer! Conventional surveys are sluggish, solely capturing suggestions from about 0.1% of shoppers, typically leading to biased responses. Our strategy focuses on unconscious reactions, that are extra correct as a result of they’re involuntary. This permits us to cowl 100% of shoppers interacting with a shelf and ship real-time insights inside about two minutes via our dashboard.
In the case of video-based strategies, they depend on cameras, which naturally increase privateness issues, even when measures like face blurring are utilized. We needed to create a privacy-first answer that doesn’t make folks really feel like they’re being watched, which is why we’ve taken a distinct strategy fully — one which’s respectful of buyer privateness whereas nonetheless delivering the insights retailers want.
How does Wayvee’s RF expertise guarantee buyer privateness whereas nonetheless offering deep emotional insights?
It’s fairly easy — we don’t see folks’s faces or determine their figures in an area. All the info we obtain is totally anonymized. Not like different options that blur faces or create 3D fashions to cope with privateness points, we don’t should do any of that as a result of the way in which we collect info is completely completely different. We’re not working with visuals; it’s all accomplished via alerts, so privateness issues simply don’t come into play the identical method.
Wayvee affords on the spot suggestions on metrics like buyer satisfaction (C-SAT) and engagement. How do these insights impression a retailer’s capacity to make swift and efficient operational modifications?
At our core, we give attention to delivering actionable insights for enchancment. We transcend metrics like dwell time and common pace, which will be relative however don’t inform the complete story. The true worth lies in combining these metrics with deeper insights that specify the outcomes. With our information, retailers can optimize retailer layouts via A/B testing, experimenting with shelf preparations, shows, and retail media to reinforce buyer satisfaction.
We additionally help with workload planning by recommending useful resource allocation primarily based on buyer move and engagement. For instance, throughout a pilot venture with a sneaker retailer, we found that sooner buyer motion correlated with larger purchases. Employees involvement was really slowing down the method, so we instructed decreasing employees throughout peak instances, which elevated gross sales. It’s wonderful how small modifications can have such a big impression!
As extra retailers undertake privacy-driven options, the place do you see the way forward for in-store analytics heading? How do you intend to develop Wayvee’s expertise and attain within the coming years?
I believe the way forward for in-store analytics will certainly lean towards being extra customer-focused. It’s not nearly making their procuring expertise smoother and extra gratifying, but additionally about respecting their privateness. With Wayvee, we have now huge plans forward. Past what we’re already doing, there are such a lot of potential use instances for our tech — whether or not it’s measuring the effectiveness of retail media or understanding how various kinds of content material impression clients. We’re even wanting into issues like worth prediction primarily based on buy intent. There’s a lot alternative to assist retailers evolve whereas holding their clients on the heart of the procuring expertise.
By way of scalability, how simple is it for retailers to combine Wayvee’s answer into their present retailer infrastructure?
Our machine is simple to put in and requires minimal technical know-how, needing no ongoing upkeep. Retailers can set it up in simply 10 to half-hour by attaching it to a shelf and setting the monitoring zone. Not like digital camera programs, there’s no want for a big upfront set up. Retailers can begin with a number of sensors throughout a check interval and develop as wanted. Every machine covers a 3.5-meter vary, and as soon as they ship us their retailer structure, we’ll add it to the dashboard for correct information assortment. All machine information is centralized in a single dashboard for simple monitoring and comparability.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to Wayvee Analytics.
