How Alakai works
Finally: trade data answers
your whole commercial team can act on
Most CPG analytics projects come with a six-month scoping document, a two-year timeline, and a price tag that makes the C-Suite wince. Alakai doesn’t work that way.
We start by addressing what costs your commercial team the most right now: missed promotion learnings, hours of manual data prep, and seriously delayed account insights.
From there, we connect your existing data so your team can see true trade promotion performance before kicking off the next planning cycle.
Step 1: We meet with your CPG commercial team
Every CPG organization has a different starting point. Before we scope anything, we spend time learning the real ins and outs of how your organization works. This includes:
- Your current trade promotion workflow: We’ll examine where trade promotion validation and post-event analysis stall, how long each step takes, and which teams carry the manual workloads.
- Your data environment: This includes your systems, where different data lives, what’s available for integration, and any data gaps.
- Your CPG commercial team structure: This helps us understand which roles need what kind of insights, on what cadence, and in what format.
- Your highest-priority accounts and categories: Help us understand your biggest analytical gaps and what quick wins would mean the most to your company.
The discovery phase typically takes one to two non-billable working sessions with our team.
Step 2: Connect your CPG trade data with Alakai
We have two ways to connect to your data based on your organization’s analytical maturity and your IT team’s requirements:
Scheduled data transfer
Your team pushes specific datasets to Alakai on a predetermined cadence. This path has minimal infrastructure requirements, regardless of whether you have a data lake in place. Standard data processing agreements apply.
Federated access
Alakai connects directly to your existing cloud environment (e.g., Snowflake, SAP S/4 HANA, Databricks, and Cloud Native Databases). Your data stays in your environment. We access only what’s required for the agreed commercial use cases, and everything feeds back into your own AI tools.
No matter which path you choose, your data never goes into Alakai’s AI. Alakai is built end-to-end on AWS, with no third-party integrations. All data exchange happens through encrypted, private network connections, adhering to the same infrastructure standards AWS holds itself to.
Simply put: we connect to your AI tools and existing workflows, not the other way around.
Step 3: CPG trade promotion analytics
and insights for your whole commercial team
Alakai delivers role-specific insights so everyone on your commercial CPG team gets what they need to know. The right data gets to the right people, at the right cadence, without anyone building one-off reports.
Account Teams
Start your post-event analysis (PEA) with accurate, timely data. The week after a promotion ends, you get event-level detail for every promotion at every account on your patch. These dashboards include tactic, price point, overlay, display execution, incremental volume, and more.
Sales Directors and Trade Managers
When you can see gross margin, incremental NSV data, and what’s actually moving the needle right after every promotion, you can defend every trade dollar. Alakai automatically assembles the data you need so you can focus on the analysis that actually shapes the final plan.
Commercial Strategy and RGM Leaders
Go beyond individual account insights with portfolio-level promotion intelligence. Alakai shows you which promotional mechanics are driving the highest ROI across your category, which competitors are impacting your share, and how to direct trade investment for the next planning cycle.
Step 4: Expand and scale
your trade promotion strategy
Most clients start with a single use case and scale their usage as results compound across categories and accounts.
A typical expansion path looks like this:
- Start: Trade Promotion Validation and Post-Event Insights for one category or account group.
- Next: Expand PEA coverage to additional categories, accounts, and competitor promotions.
- Ongoing: Every promotion analyzed with Alakai enters your organizational knowledge base, informing each planning cycle with what actually happened in the last one.
There’s no minimum commitment to the full platform. For a mid-size CPG manufacturer, Alakai typically pays for itself within the first 5 to 6 months—before the second planning cycle even starts.
Common questions about working with Alakai
You don’t need much to get started. There are two integration paths you can take, depending on your current analytical infrastructure. A scheduled data transfer is all that’s required to start using Alakai.
You don’t need a data lake or infrastructure build. If you already have a data lake, we can connect to it directly via a federated connection.
Most implementations deliver insights within a few weeks of the initial data connection. Our discovery phase takes one to two working sessions. Data integration timelines depend on your organization’s chosen path, but even enterprise implementations have moved quickly once internal approvals were in place.
The goal is always to get your team seeing real promotion performance before your next planning cycle, not after.
Yes, and that’s our recommendation. Starting with a single category or account set gives your team fast, concrete proof of value before you scale.
Your first project is scoped to deliver clear proof of value and doesn’t require full-platform commitment before seeing what Alakai can do for your team.
Each role gets a highly relevant view of the same underlying data.
- Account teams see event-level promotion details for their specific accounts, delivered the week after a promotion ends.
- Trade directors get cross-account visibility into how tactics and spend track across their portfolio.
- Commercial strategy and RGM leaders gain portfolio-wide insights for planning and trade investment decisions.
No. Alakai operates as your company’s data layer, not the AI layer. Your data only connects to your AI tools and commercial workflows, not Alakai’s AI.
Ready for an accurate look
at your last trade promotion?
We’ll show you a live trade promotion validation and post-event analysis workflow using a real CPG promotion example. You’ll see how the same promotion surfaces differently for different team members, all built from the same data.
