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 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 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 ready to remodel how retailers achieve 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 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 spotted many industries like retail had been eager 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.
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 actually 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 modifications. That received me considering — if radio waves can detect motion, why couldn’t additionally they seize coronary heart price 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 thought. The staff 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 growing our MVP and finally our personal {hardware} system – Wayvee sensor.
Wayvee was launched out of stealth in 2024. Are you able to discuss in regards to 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 varied potential functions for this expertise, from healthcare to good houses. Nonetheless, my expertise in customer-facing markets rapidly confirmed that retail had the best potential for affect. Retailers are continually in search of methods to extend buyer satisfaction and the right way 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 knowledge assortment.
By way of our pilot stage, it’s turn out to be clear that retailers want actionable insights, not simply knowledge. It’s not sufficient to easily establish sad prospects — we assist clarify why and supply suggestions for fast enchancment, conserving prospects 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 respiratory and coronary heart price utilizing radio frequency (RF) waves?
For us, privateness is a giant 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 will be tough, particularly if the particular person’s place or angle throws it off. Are you able to think about what number of cameras it’s essential 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 areas, emits radio indicators and captures them once they bounce again, carrying a spread of knowledge — from respiratory and coronary heart price 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 indignant, completely satisfied, 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 deal with real-time emotional shifts fairly than total states, leveraging our intensive dataset to determine baselines for figuring out feelings like happiness, disappointment or frustration. This knowledge is shipped 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, simpler than conventional strategies like surveys or video surveillance?
We convey every part collectively in a single answer! Conventional surveys are gradual, solely capturing suggestions from about 0.1% of consumers, typically leading to biased responses. Our strategy focuses on unconscious reactions, that are extra correct as a result of they’re involuntary. This enables us to cowl 100% of consumers 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 elevate 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 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 info we obtain is totally anonymized. Not like 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 best way we collect data is completely totally different. We’re not working with visuals; it’s all carried out by indicators, so privateness issues simply don’t come into play the identical approach.
Wayvee affords immediate suggestions on metrics like buyer satisfaction (C-SAT) and engagement. How do these insights affect a retailer’s means to make swift and efficient operational modifications?
At our core, we deal with delivering actionable insights for enchancment. We transcend metrics like dwell time and common velocity, which will be relative however don’t inform the complete story. The true 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 reinforce buyer satisfaction.
We additionally help with workload planning by recommending useful resource allocation based mostly on buyer movement and engagement. For instance, throughout a pilot venture with a sneaker retailer, we found that quicker buyer motion correlated with greater purchases. Workers involvement was really slowing down the method, so we urged lowering workers throughout peak occasions, which elevated gross sales. It’s superb how small modifications 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 propose to increase Wayvee’s expertise and attain within the coming years?
I believe 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 gratifying, but additionally about respecting their privateness. With Wayvee, we’ve large 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 several types of content material affect prospects. We’re even trying into issues like worth prediction based mostly on buy intent. There’s a lot alternative to assist retailers evolve whereas conserving their prospects on the middle of the buying expertise.
When it comes to scalability, how straightforward is it for retailers to combine Wayvee’s answer into their current retailer infrastructure?
Our system 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. Not like digital camera methods, 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 system 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 system knowledge is centralized in a single dashboard for straightforward monitoring and comparability.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to Wayvee Analytics.
