About the Client
PLTFRM is a commerce operator for high-growth consumer brands, with more than 650 team members across the US and over 700 brand partners generating upward of $11 billion in annual sales. They run end-to-end retail and digital execution across the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart, Target, and Amazon, among others.
Goals
The company’s value rests on translating retailer sales data into decisions that help those brands grow, which makes the speed and reliability of its analytics a direct driver of client outcomes. As PLTFRM scaled, CTO Justin Richie saw the pattern clearly: the company’s competitive edge would increasingly be defined by how fast and how intelligently it could turn data into decisions. That conviction set the direction for this engagement.
To support its growth ambitions, PLTFRM set out to modernize the way retailer data was collected, standardized, and transformed into insights. With information coming from numerous retail partners, each using different formats and metrics, the company needed a more scalable foundation that could unify data, accelerate reporting, and enable faster, more informed recommendations for consumer brands.
Richie had already validated the Data + AI direction through early experimentation and knew the next step required a platform built for scale. PLTFRM needed to move beyond traditional reporting processes and establish the foundation for an AI-first operating model with real-time insights. To achieve that vision, the company partnered with CloudX, now part of Bridgenext Latin America, to build a centralized multitenant intelligence platform.
Solution
Through a close partnership, PLTFRM implemented a centralized Data and AI platform to support its AI-first vision and create a scalable foundation for analytics and decision-making. The solution automates the collection, validation, and standardization of retailer data from multiple sources, replacing dozens of manual processes with a single, unified workflow. As a result, data that once required significant manual preparation is now automatically ingested and consolidated, giving teams faster access to trusted information and a consistent view of retailer performance across clients.
Built on top of this foundation, PLTFRM introduced AI-powered capabilities, Vendo and Bond, that further accelerate how insights are delivered. Vendo automates report generation and uses Gen AI to help interpret metrics and draft strategic recommendations, while keeping analysts in control through a human review process. Bond provides a conversational interface that allows teams to access insights, generate reports, and interact with data using natural language.
Designed to evolve alongside the business, the platform provides a flexible foundation for future innovation, helping PLTFRM scale its analytics capabilities while continuing to deliver faster, data-driven guidance to the brands it serves.
For a long time, ‘data-driven’ at PLTFRM meant an analyst logging into retailer portals one at a time, all week, to build a single report. Fixing that took engineers who would learn how our team actually works and build around it, and that’s what we got with CloudX, now part of Bridgenext. Today the AI drafts the conclusions, and my analysts spend their week on the part only they can do: telling a brand what to do next.
Results
- A unified, automated workflow that ingests and standardizes data from every retail partner.
- Historical and daily retailer data available in a single queryable view of performance.
- A data foundation that scales to new clients and retailers without being rebuilt.
- Faster, more reliable guidance for client brands.
- Analysts focused on sharpening the recommendations that help brands sell more at retail.
The through-line of this project is leadership and vision. AI adoption is not a guaranteed path, but for a company whose value rests on turning data into advice, standing still carries a guaranteed cost. Justin Richie read that clearly and acted, replacing the manual status quo with an AI-first operating model. What made it work was a genuine partnership: Richie’s vision and his team’s deep knowledge of the business, paired with the engineering judgment of CloudX, a Bridgenext Company, to turn that direction into a platform built to last. The result is a business that serves its clients at the speed the market demands, while positioning itself to compound data advantage as it scales.
