Alex Ovcharov is the founder and CEO of Wayvee Analytics, a real-time buyer satisfaction and engagement monitoring resolution for retail, and the co-founder of Sensemitter. He has intensive expertise in analysis, product improvement, and buyer conduct evaluation, gained by means of his roles as Product Director at Shazam Jap 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 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 about to rework 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 mission utilizing facial coding, I noticed many industries like retail have been occupied with such expertise, although privateness and tech limitations have been main challenges.
Combining my background in neuroscience and product improvement, I noticed the necessity for higher buyer understanding in offline environments, the place present 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, 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 may seize knowledge on how folks 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 in addition they seize coronary heart fee 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 gaggle of researchers and neuroscientists, we constructed a prototype utilizing an everyday Wi-Fi router to check the concept. The staff engineered an algorithm that would detect respiration and micro-movements utilizing simply Wi-Fi alerts, and we patented the expertise. This marked the start of growing 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 good properties. Nevertheless, my expertise in customer-facing markets rapidly confirmed that retail had the best potential for impression. Retailers are continuously searching for methods to extend buyer satisfaction and find out how to higher perceive their viewers, but they typically depend on outdated strategies that don’t present real-time insights or face privateness considerations with private knowledge assortment.
By way of our pilot stage, it’s change into clear that retailers want actionable insights, not simply knowledge. It’s not sufficient to easily establish sad prospects — we assist clarify why and provide suggestions for quick enchancment, conserving prospects happy within the second.
Wayvee makes use of a privacy-preserving sensor with no cameras. How does your expertise handle to seize physiological alerts like respiration and coronary heart fee 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 decoding feelings could be difficult, particularly if the particular person’s place or angle throws it off. Are you able to think about what number of cameras you want to set up to have the ability to see an individual from completely different angles?
As an alternative, we use radio waves. The Wayvee sensor, put in on cabinets or different key areas, emits radio alerts and captures them after they bounce again, carrying a spread of information — from respiration and coronary heart fee 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, completely happy, impartial, and many others.
Are you able to clarify how the AI algorithm processes these physiological alerts and interprets them into actionable insights for retailers?
Wayvee gadgets seize radio wave alerts, permitting our algorithms to establish objects and find folks. Our AI then analyzes their responses utilizing a skilled neural community based mostly on the arousal-valence mannequin, which assesses emotional depth and positivity.
We concentrate on real-time emotional shifts relatively than general states, leveraging our intensive dataset to determine 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 alerts like HRV and physique gestures, simpler than conventional strategies like surveys or video surveillance?
We convey every part collectively in a single resolution! Conventional surveys are sluggish, solely capturing suggestions from about 0.1% of consumers, typically 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 consumers interacting with a shelf and ship real-time insights inside about two minutes by means of our dashboard.
In terms of video-based strategies, they depend on cameras, which naturally elevate privateness considerations, even when measures like face blurring are utilized. We wished to create a privacy-first resolution that doesn’t make folks really feel like they’re being watched, which is why we’ve taken a unique method totally — 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 folks’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 cope with privateness points, we don’t need to do any of that as a result of the way in which we collect info is completely completely different. We’re not working with visuals; it’s all achieved by means of alerts, so privateness considerations simply don’t come into play the identical approach.
Wayvee presents on the spot suggestions on metrics like buyer satisfaction (C-SAT) and engagement. How do these insights impression a retailer’s capability to make swift and efficient operational modifications?
At our core, we concentrate on delivering actionable insights for enchancment. We transcend metrics like dwell time and common velocity, which could be relative however don’t inform the total story. The actual worth lies in combining these metrics with deeper insights that designate the outcomes. With our knowledge, retailers can optimize retailer layouts by means of 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 mission with a sneaker retailer, we found that quicker buyer motion correlated with larger purchases. Workers involvement was truly slowing down the method, so we steered lowering workers throughout peak instances, which elevated gross sales. It’s wonderful how small modifications can have such a major impression!
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 purchasing expertise smoother and extra fulfilling, but additionally about respecting their privateness. With Wayvee, we now have 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 impression prospects. We’re even wanting into issues like value prediction based mostly on buy intent. There’s a lot alternative to assist retailers evolve whereas conserving their prospects on the heart of the purchasing expertise.
By way of scalability, how straightforward is it for retailers to combine Wayvee’s resolution into their present 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 methods, 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 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 good interview, readers who want to study extra ought to go to Wayvee Analytics.
