Every store needs the number before the doors open.
Thousands of managers open the same dashboards at the same time, and slow refreshes or throttled capacity mean decisions wait. Retail needs reporting that is fast for everyone at once.
Industries · Retail
Scale dashboards and agents across every store and function
One governed platform for store operations, merchandising, supply chain, finance, and HR—sub-second dashboards, company-wide agents, and back-office workflows.
Thousands of store managers. Real-time operations. Sub-second.
Runs in your cloudPermissions inheritedViewer access includedOpen data formats
What customers say
“It's good to understand the capability of the platform. That how far, and how quickly you guys can get these things going [...] that has been impressive overall.”
“Lets us get a lot more out of our data than [...] We can sit on top of all of the data in [our data warehouse] as opposed to just, like, our little ingested, you know, three gigabytes semantic models. I think we have a lot of power here.”
“This is super cool. So in the future, our data will be sitting in [a cloud data warehouse]... How is this running so quickly?”
“You guys are functioning better because the harness is tested for a longer period of time against enterprise customers.”
“This is where the puck's going and this is where the moat is for an enterprise.”
“You said advanced analysis is not possible. Here is what I did.”
“Gave Athena the spreadsheet, explained which column I was trying to figure out, and then ten secs it told me... exactly how the calculation was based on the other data.”
“He wrote the entire stuff. By itself. And I was there, and I was thinking, alright. If I had to write all this stuff, I mean, I would've spent days, days, days.”
“I send that to the programmer and he said, alright. I read your file. I copied the section of the code because he has the right interface, and it works. Wow. Just like magic.”
“One workspace. All different, let's say, avatars of their output data. Right? Suddenly, it's dashboard. Excel is here. PowerPoint is when it's all together. It's very impressive.”
Verbatim from customer calls. Customers anonymized.
Challenges
What Retail has to get right
Too many AI tools, too many security reviews.
Point tools each need their own review and their own access to data, and few reach the systems where the work happens. One governed platform replaces the sprawl.
The permissions already exist. The tools ignore them.
Store, regional, and corporate access is already defined in your systems. Athena inherits it, so every person and agent sees exactly what they should.
Use cases by team
What a Fortune 500 Retailer runs on Athena
Store & field operationsStore and district managers see what is happening in each store, what is arriving, and where to act first.
Store performance dashboards
One dashboard for every store and district, filtered to each manager's stores and fast enough to use on the floor. Viewer access by directory group.
In-stock and order exceptions
An agent watches stock, orders, and deliveries and surfaces the few issues with the most impact each morning, with the records behind each one.
Store visit preparation
Before a visit, district managers get a one-page brief on the store: trends, open issues, and what changed since last time.
Merchandising & assortmentCategory teams find assortment gaps and act on them without waiting in a report queue.
Assortment gap analysis
Your assortment joined to market and competitor data shows where you are under-ranged, drillable by category and product.
Governed merchandising models
Analysts define metrics once in a semantic model; category managers explore and ask questions on their own.
Weekly category review
A scheduled workflow builds the category deck in your template, with every number cited to its source.
Supply chain & logisticsOperations teams stop re-keying partner files and hear about data problems before the business does.
Partner file intake
Files that arrive by email are read, checked, and processed with your existing logic into the standard weekly report.
Data pipeline monitoring
An agent checks that each morning's data arrived on time, finds the cause when it did not, and tells report owners before the day starts.
Replenishment signals
Demand, stock, and supplier data combined to flag where replenishment is falling behind.
Finance & back officeFinance and HR teams hand recurring checks to workflows and review only the exceptions.
Invoice reconciliation
Invoices matched against payments and purchase orders, with unpaid, underpaid, and overpaid items flagged and cited for review.
Payroll exception review
Payroll output compared with HR records; likely errors go to HR before the run.
Spreadsheet intake
Files from many sources normalized into one format; anything the agent cannot map confidently goes to a person once, and the rule sticks.
Every employeeA branded assistant for store and support-center staff, using each person's own access.
Company-wide assistant
An assistant over email, files, and chat that answers from company knowledge with each person's permissions, provisioned by directory group.
Daily agenda
Each morning the assistant pulls together meetings, tasks, and anything that needs attention, and offers to take the first step.
IT, security & dataIT connects the systems once and governs every AI tool from one place.
Central identity and consent
Users are provisioned through your identity provider with tenant-wide consent, so no one has to connect accounts one by one.
Warehouse flexibility
Open table formats mean a change of warehouse does not break dashboards or agents.
Legacy automation clean-up
Old scripts and bots moved into governed workflows that pause and recover when a step fails, with hard budgets on every run.
Customer story
From a four-hour refresh to sub-second on 100M+ rows
- Before
A store-operations dashboard at a Fortune 500 retailer refreshed in about four hours. Thousands of managers opened it Monday morning. Capacity frequently throttled. Several ungoverned capacities, 45-minute-to-4-hour refreshes across the BI estate.
- What we did
Imported the existing report. Rebuilt the semantic model on Athena Lakehouse, Iceberg tables in the retailer's own object storage. Pointed it at the same 100M+ row table. Two custom visuals did not round-trip; they were rebuilt once and the import listed the rest.
- After
Cross-filter in under a second. Everyone at once on Monday. Included in Athena services. Fresher data, one platform.
What to plan for
Two custom visuals did not round-trip. Standard ones do and the import lists the rest. Athena does not replace your ERP or planning system; it works on top of them with approval.
Example workflow
Weekly reporting from a shared inbox to an output template
Integrations
The systems Retail already runs
Athena works on top of the systems retailers already run, with permissions inherited from each source.
Data & analytics
SnowflakeDatabricksBigQueryIcebergExcel
ERP & finance
SAPOracleWorkdayNetSuite
Collaboration
Microsoft 365Google WorkspaceSlackTeams
Operations
WMS and OMSPOS dataSupplier portalsSFTP
Security and compliance
What your security review will ask
Retail moves fast and audits hard. Athena runs in your cloud with permissions inherited from the source. Every save stamped with the author, human or agent. Every run logged. Open Iceberg tables mean no vendor index.
Runs in your cloud
Deploy in your object storage. Data lands as Iceberg tables you own. No vendor index. Open Iceberg made a warehouse migration a non-event for the dashboards.
Permissions inherited per user
The agent sees what its user sees. Enterprise search across SharePoint with inherited permissions. Each user's Outlook credentials so they see their own email and calendar data.
SOC 2 Type II
Touchless O365 consent. Okta SSO. Just-in-time, time-bounded access requested per incident, approved by the customer, expiring automatically, logged twice: once by the platform, once by the cluster.
Every save attributed
Every save in Athena Sheets stamped with the author, human or agent, plus the session and message that caused it. Open Activity Monitor, see the range the agent touched, before and after, and the conversation where it happened.
Every run logged
Every Agent Operating Procedure run logged. Every step attributable. A human approves the steps you mark. Hard budgets cap the cost of any retry loop.
Open Iceberg tables
No vendor lock-in. Iceberg tables in your object storage. Code exportable to your own GitHub. Semantic models reviewable. One warehouse swap and the dashboards stayed unchanged.
For every stakeholder
Answers for everyone who signs off
Can Athena be the AI platform for our whole company?
Yes. One branded assistant and one set of applications for stores, distribution, and the support center, provisioned by directory group, with each person seeing only what they already can.
How do we roll this out without a per-user setup burden?
Provision through your identity provider with tenant-wide consent and single sign-on. Permissions are inherited from every source, and every action is logged.
Will dashboards stay fast when every store opens them at once?
Yes. Dashboards are built for many concurrent viewers and respond in under a second, without scheduled refresh windows.
How is access for store teams handled?
Viewer access to published dashboards and applications is included in Athena services. Talk to us about your rollout and we will scope it with you.
FAQ
What can AI agents do for a retailer?
They take on the work between systems that people do today by hand: pulling numbers together before stores open, spotting stock and order problems, preparing reviews and store visits, reconciling invoices, and answering employee questions. People review the results and make the calls.
Where should we start?
With one recurring job that many people depend on and nobody enjoys, such as a weekly performance review, an exception report, or a store-visit brief. It proves value quickly and sets the pattern for the next one.
Do we need to replace our current systems?
No. Agents work on top of the systems you already run and use the access people already have. Nothing has to be ripped out to start.
Can this reach store teams, not just headquarters?
Yes. Agents can deliver results by email, chat, or phone, and applications can be published to every store by directory group, with access included in Athena services.
How do we keep control as agents take on more?
Every action is logged and attributed, anything important waits for a person's approval, and budgets cap what any run can cost. You decide how much autonomy each workflow gets.
One platform underneath
AGS · Athena Governance System
Records every change by a person or an agent, rolls back one contributor's edits without losing anyone else's, and keeps the model, instructions, and sources behind each agent action.
Palladium · deployment
How the platform is deployed: Athena's managed cloud, your cloud on AWS, GCP, or Azure, on-prem, air-gapped, or GovCloud. Same platform in every option.
How it fits together
Build, Work, and Data on top; 150+ connectors and every surface in and out; one map of the whole platform.
Related
Athena Library
Run this on a schedule
Ready-made retail briefs you can run on a schedule.
Bring one report and one operations problem.
We will rebuild the report on your data, show every store manager their own view, and walk your IT team through the permission model.
Runs in your cloudPermissions inheritedViewer access includedOpen data formats