ICA Gruppen Cuts AI Proof-of-Concept Time from 18 Months to 10 Weeks on BigQuery
ICA Gruppen· SwedenBigQuery · Bigtable · Gemini +3Swedish retailer ICA Gruppen architected its Business Intelligence Cloud Analytics (BICA) platform on Google Cloud, centered on BigQuery, and migrated its machine learning workloads, including its personalized recommendation engine, to the Gemini platform. The team also launched Shop with AI, a Gemini-based shopping assistant that simplifies meal planning. A recent proof of concept with ICA Bank was completed in two and a half months, a process that would have taken approximately 18 months previously.
Overview
Swedish retailer ICA Gruppen architected its Business Intelligence Cloud Analytics (BICA) platform on Google Cloud, centered on BigQuery, and migrated its machine learning workloads, including its personalized recommendation engine, to the Gemini platform. The team also launched Shop with AI, a Gemini-based shopping assistant that simplifies meal planning. A recent proof of concept with ICA Bank was completed in two and a half months, a process that would have taken approximately 18 months previously.
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Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
ICA's fragmented technical environment was holding it back: data was siloed across legacy platforms and SQL server environments, creating high maintenance costs and preventing teams from sharing insights, while innovation stalled as data scientists struggled to push ML models into production.
The solution
ICA architected the Business Intelligence Cloud Analytics (BICA) platform on Google Cloud, centered on BigQuery, moving away from traditional ETL tools toward an engineering-led approach with its own code-based frameworks to automate ingestion, security and connectivity. It streams high-volume store data through Kafka into BigQuery, uses a custom column-level encryption service with decryption views so unencrypted data is never stored at rest in BigQuery, and uses Spanner and Bigtable to power low-latency operational APIs. ICA has transitioned to Looker as its semantic layer. It migrated its machine learning workloads, including its personalized recommendation engine, to the Gemini platform, and used the data foundation to launch Shop with AI, a shopping assistant that uses Gemini to let users chat to simplify meal planning, combining ICA's recipe library with real-time customer insights.
Reported business value
Migrating its machine learning workloads to the Gemini platform improved training and deployment speeds while lowering operational costs. A recent proof of concept with ICA Bank was completed in just two and a half months, a process that would have taken approximately 18 months previously, and the team says it can move from an idea to a real-world pilot in weeks rather than months.
Sources
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