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 by his roles as Product Director at Shazam Japanese 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 group 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 ready to remodel how retailers acquire actionable insights on buyer satisfaction and engagement, delivered in real-time with out the usage of 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 challenge utilizing facial coding, I spotted many industries like retail had been concerned about 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 current instruments had been both gradual 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, making certain 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 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 gadgets might seize knowledge 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 charge and respiration? These are key indicators for understanding emotional states.
Along with Viacheslav Matiunin, Wayvee’s CTO and a physicist who led knowledge evaluation for the LHCb experiment at CERN, and a bunch of researchers and neuroscientists, we constructed a prototype utilizing a daily Wi-Fi router to check the concept. The group engineered an algorithm that might detect respiration and micro-movements utilizing simply Wi-Fi indicators, and we patented the expertise. This marked the start of creating our MVP and finally our personal {hardware} gadget – Wayvee sensor.
Wayvee was launched out of stealth in 2024. Are you able to discuss 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 good houses. Nevertheless, my expertise in customer-facing markets shortly confirmed that retail had the best potential for affect. Retailers are continuously looking for methods to extend buyer satisfaction and how you can higher perceive their viewers, but they usually depend on outdated strategies that don’t present real-time insights or face privateness considerations with private knowledge assortment.
By our pilot stage, it’s grow to be clear that retailers want actionable insights, not simply knowledge. It’s not sufficient to easily establish sad clients — we assist clarify why and supply suggestions for fast 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 indicators like respiration and coronary heart charge 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 might be difficult, particularly if the individual’s place or angle throws it off. Are you able to think about what number of cameras you’ll want to set up to have the ability to see an individual from totally different angles?
As a substitute, we use radio waves. The Wayvee sensor, put in on cabinets or different key places, emits radio indicators and captures them once they bounce again, carrying a variety of information — from respiration and coronary heart charge to refined shifts like posture, strolling velocity, and gestures. Our AI algorithms then course of this knowledge and convert it into emotional insights, recognizing if an individual is offended, pleased, impartial, and so on.
Are you able to clarify how the AI algorithm processes these physiological indicators and interprets them into actionable insights for retailers?
Wayvee gadgets seize radio wave indicators, permitting our algorithms to establish objects and find individuals. Our AI then analyzes their responses utilizing a educated neural community based mostly on the arousal-valence mannequin, which assesses emotional depth and positivity.
We give attention to real-time emotional shifts reasonably than total states, leveraging our in depth dataset to determine baselines for figuring out feelings like happiness, unhappiness or frustration. This knowledge 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 stories and obtain alerts for buyer dissatisfaction, enabling fast motion.
What makes your strategy to emotion AI, which relies on physiological indicators like HRV and physique gestures, more practical than conventional strategies like surveys or video surveillance?
We carry every thing collectively in a single answer! Conventional surveys are gradual, solely capturing suggestions from about 0.1% of consumers, usually 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 consumers interacting with a shelf and ship real-time insights inside about two minutes by our dashboard.
Relating to video-based strategies, they depend on cameras, which naturally increase privateness considerations, even when measures like face blurring are utilized. We needed 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 unique 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 individuals’s faces or establish their figures in an area. All the information we obtain is totally anonymized. Not like different options that blur faces or create 3D fashions to cope with privateness points, we don’t must do any of that as a result of the best way we collect info is completely totally different. We’re not working with visuals; it’s all completed by indicators, so privateness considerations 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 affect a retailer’s skill to make swift and efficient operational adjustments?
At our core, we give attention to delivering actionable insights for enchancment. We transcend metrics like dwell time and common velocity, which might be relative however don’t inform the total story. The actual worth lies in combining these metrics with deeper insights that specify the outcomes. With our knowledge, retailers can optimize retailer layouts by 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 circulate and engagement. For instance, throughout a pilot challenge with a sneaker retailer, we found that sooner buyer motion correlated with larger purchases. Workers involvement was truly slowing down the method, so we advised decreasing employees throughout peak instances, which elevated gross sales. It’s superb how small adjustments can have such a major affect!
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 broaden Wayvee’s expertise 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 procuring expertise smoother and extra satisfying, but in addition 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 circumstances for our tech — whether or not it’s measuring the effectiveness of retail media or understanding how various kinds of content material affect clients. We’re even trying into issues like worth prediction based mostly 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 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. Not like digicam programs, there’s no want for a big upfront set up. Retailers can begin with a number of sensors throughout a take a look at interval and broaden 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 knowledge assortment. All gadget knowledge is centralized in a single dashboard for straightforward monitoring and comparability.
Thanks for the nice interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to Wayvee Analytics.
