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 habits evaluation, gained by his roles as Product Director at Shazam Jap 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 workforce 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 remodel how retailers achieve 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 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 noticed many industries like retail have been fascinated by such expertise, although privateness and tech limitations have 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 have 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.
May 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 knowledge on how individuals transfer, and the way radio waves are extraordinarily delicate to those place modifications. That bought 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 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 workforce engineered an algorithm that would detect respiratory 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} 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 reworking the retail analytics panorama?
As a deep tech firm targeted on Emotion AI for the bodily world, we see numerous potential functions 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 always in search of 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 issues with private knowledge assortment.
By way of our pilot stage, it’s turn into 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 quick enchancment, maintaining clients happy within the second.
Wayvee makes use of a privacy-preserving sensor with no cameras. How does your expertise handle to seize physiological indicators like respiratory 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 deciphering 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 could set up to have the ability to see an individual from totally different angles?
As an alternative, we use radio waves. The Wayvee sensor, put in on cabinets or different key areas, emits radio indicators and captures them once they bounce again, carrying a variety of knowledge — from respiratory and coronary heart charge to delicate 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 indignant, pleased, impartial, and many others.
Are you able to clarify how the AI algorithm processes these physiological indicators and interprets them into actionable insights for retailers?
Wayvee units seize radio wave indicators, permitting our algorithms to establish objects and find individuals. 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 moderately than general states, leveraging our in depth dataset to ascertain baselines for figuring out feelings like happiness, disappointment 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 experiences and obtain alerts for buyer dissatisfaction, enabling quick motion.
What makes your method to emotion AI, which is predicated on physiological indicators like HRV and physique gestures, simpler than conventional strategies like surveys or video surveillance?
We carry all the things collectively in a single answer! Conventional surveys are sluggish, solely capturing suggestions from about 0.1% of shoppers, usually 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 shoppers interacting with a shelf and ship real-time insights inside about two minutes by 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 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 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 absolutely anonymized. In contrast to different options that blur faces or create 3D fashions to take care of privateness points, we don’t should do any of that as a result of the way in which we collect info is completely totally different. We’re not working with visuals; it’s all finished by indicators, so privateness issues simply don’t come into play the identical means.
Wayvee presents prompt 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 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 primarily based on buyer stream and engagement. For instance, throughout a pilot venture with a sneaker retailer, we found that quicker buyer motion correlated with increased purchases. Employees involvement was really slowing down the method, so we prompt lowering workers throughout peak occasions, 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 propose 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 buying expertise smoother and extra pleasant, but additionally 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 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 maintaining their clients on the middle of the buying expertise.
By way of scalability, how simple is it for retailers to combine Wayvee’s answer into their current 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. In contrast to digital camera programs, there’s no want for a big upfront set up. Retailers can begin with a couple of sensors throughout a take a look at interval and broaden 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 knowledge assortment. All machine 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.
