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 intensive expertise in analysis, product improvement, and buyer habits evaluation, gained by way of his roles as Product Director at Shazam Japanese Europe and thru his entrepreneurial ventures.
His skilled journey consists of 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 Might 2023. This innovation in Emotion AI is about to remodel 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 Japanese Europe, I launched the area’s first Augmented Actuality (AR) marketing campaign and noticed how facial expressions revealed emotional patterns. Main a analysis mission utilizing facial coding, I spotted many industries like retail had been desirous about such know-how, although privateness and tech limitations had been main challenges.
Combining my background in neuroscience and product improvement, I noticed the necessity for higher buyer understanding in offline environments, the place current 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 know-how that operates with radio waves, guaranteeing 100% buyer privateness and delivering insights in actual time.
May you share extra in regards to the discovery in WiFi sensing that sparked the creation of Wayvee?
In Might 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 may seize information on how individuals transfer, and the way radio waves are extraordinarily delicate to those place adjustments. That obtained me considering — if radio waves can detect motion, why couldn’t in addition they seize coronary heart fee 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 know-how. This marked the start of creating our MVP and ultimately our personal {hardware} gadget – Wayvee sensor.
Wayvee was launched out of stealth in 2024. Are you able to discuss in regards to the preliminary objectives of the corporate and the way you envision reworking the retail analytics panorama?
As a deep tech firm centered on Emotion AI for the bodily world, we see varied potential purposes for this know-how, from healthcare to good properties. Nevertheless, my expertise in customer-facing markets shortly confirmed that retail had the best potential for influence. Retailers are consistently searching for methods to extend buyer satisfaction and find out how 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 our pilot stage, it’s grow to be clear that retailers want actionable insights, not simply information. It’s not sufficient to easily determine sad prospects — we assist clarify why and supply suggestions for speedy enchancment, preserving prospects glad within the second.
Wayvee makes use of a privacy-preserving sensor with no cameras. How does your know-how handle to seize physiological alerts like respiratory and coronary heart fee utilizing radio frequency (RF) waves?
For us, privateness is an enormous 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 could be difficult, particularly if the individual’s place or angle throws it off. Are you able to think about what number of cameras you should 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 once they bounce again, carrying a spread of knowledge — from respiratory and coronary heart fee to refined shifts like posture, strolling velocity, and gestures. Our AI algorithms then course of this information and convert it into emotional insights, recognizing if an individual is indignant, glad, impartial, and so forth.
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 individuals. Our AI then analyzes their responses utilizing a skilled neural community based mostly on the arousal-valence mannequin, which assesses emotional depth and positivity.
We concentrate on real-time emotional shifts moderately than total states, leveraging our intensive dataset to determine baselines for figuring out feelings like happiness, disappointment or frustration. This information is distributed 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 reviews and obtain alerts for buyer dissatisfaction, enabling speedy motion.
What makes your method to emotion AI, which relies on physiological alerts like HRV and physique gestures, more practical than conventional strategies like surveys or video surveillance?
We deliver every part collectively in a single answer! Conventional surveys are sluggish, solely capturing suggestions from about 0.1% of consumers, typically leading to biased responses. Our method focuses on unconscious reactions, that are extra correct as a result of they’re involuntary. This permits us to cowl 100% of consumers interacting with a shelf and ship real-time insights inside about two minutes by way of our dashboard.
With regards to video-based strategies, they depend on cameras, which naturally increase privateness issues, even when measures like face blurring are utilized. We wished to create a privacy-first answer that doesn’t make individuals really feel like they’re being watched, which is why we’ve taken a distinct method fully — one which’s respectful of buyer privateness whereas nonetheless delivering the insights retailers want.
How does Wayvee’s RF know-how guarantee buyer privateness whereas nonetheless offering deep emotional insights?
It’s fairly easy — we don’t see individuals’s faces or determine their figures in an area. All the information we obtain is totally anonymized. In contrast to 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 best way we collect info is completely completely different. We’re not working with visuals; it’s all accomplished by way of alerts, so privateness issues simply don’t come into play the identical means.
Wayvee provides instantaneous suggestions on metrics like buyer satisfaction (C-SAT) and engagement. How do these insights influence a retailer’s means to make swift and efficient operational adjustments?
At our core, we concentrate on delivering actionable insights for enchancment. We transcend metrics like dwell time and common velocity, which could be relative however don’t inform the total story. The true worth lies in combining these metrics with deeper insights that specify the outcomes. With our information, retailers can optimize retailer layouts by way of A/B testing, experimenting with shelf preparations, shows, and retail media to boost buyer satisfaction.
We additionally help with workload planning by recommending useful resource allocation based mostly on buyer move and engagement. For instance, throughout a pilot mission with a sneaker retailer, we found that sooner buyer motion correlated with larger purchases. Employees involvement was really slowing down the method, so we recommended lowering employees throughout peak instances, which elevated gross sales. It’s superb how small adjustments can have such a big influence!
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 increase Wayvee’s know-how and attain within the coming years?
I feel the way forward for in-store analytics will certainly lean towards being extra customer-focused. It’s not nearly making their purchasing expertise smoother and extra satisfying, but in addition about respecting their privateness. With Wayvee, we’ve got large 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 influence prospects. We’re even wanting into issues like worth prediction based mostly on buy intent. There’s a lot alternative to assist retailers evolve whereas preserving their prospects on the middle of the purchasing expertise.
By way of scalability, how straightforward is it for retailers to combine Wayvee’s answer into their current retailer infrastructure?
Our gadget is straightforward 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. In contrast to digicam programs, there’s no want for a big upfront set up. Retailers can begin with a couple of sensors throughout a check interval and increase as wanted. Every gadget covers a 3.5-meter vary, and as soon as they ship us their retailer format, we’ll add it to the dashboard for correct information assortment. All gadget information is centralized in a single dashboard for simple monitoring and comparability.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to Wayvee Analytics.
