AI Agents for Proactive CPG Analytics

4 questions covering the fundamentals of AI-powered agentic analytics for CPG commercial teams

1. What is agentic analytics for CPG?

Agentic analytics for CPG is an AI-powered approach where autonomous agents perform complex analytical workflows on syndicated, retailer, and internal data—without requiring analyst intervention for every question.

Unlike traditional BI that shows dashboards or copilots that answer one question at a time, Tellius's agentic analytics autonomously investigates multi-step problems: detecting that share dropped at Walmart, determining it was driven by distribution loss in the Midwest, identifying which specific SKUs lost shelf space, and quantifying the revenue impact—all before your team knows there's a problem.

For CPG commercial teams, this means the analytical work that previously required weeks of manual effort now happens continuously in the background.

2. How is Tellius different from our current TPM system?

Trade Promotion Management (TPM) systems like Exceedra, Anaplan TPO, or SAP TPM are designed to plan and execute promotions—managing calendars, budgets, and retailer commitments. They track what promotions ran but don't measure how they performed.

Tellius sits downstream of TPM and measures true incrementality: building statistical baselines, separating genuine lift from pantry loading and forward-buying, calculating cannibalization and halo effects, and attributing ROI to specific tactics.

Your TPM tells you that you ran a 2-for-$5 at Kroger. Tellius tells you whether that promotion actually generated profitable incremental volume or just shifted purchases that would have happened anyway.

3. Can Tellius work with Nielsen and Circana data we already have?

Tellius connects directly to Nielsen (NielsenIQ), Circana (formerly IRI), and Numerator data feeds through pre-built connectors, as well as retailer-specific platforms like Walmart Luminate, Kroger 84.51°, Amazon ARA, and Target Roundel.

The platform's CPG semantic layer understands the structure of syndicated data—market hierarchies, UPC relationships, time periods, geography levels—and maps these to your internal data sources without requiring custom data engineering for each connection.

Most CPG deployments are fully operational within 8-12 weeks, including data integration and semantic layer configuration.

4. What makes Tellius's CPG semantic layer better than generic AI analytics?

Generic AI tools require you to explain your business in every prompt. Tellius's CPG-native semantic layer already understands that:

• "Lift" means incremental sales during promotion period

• "ACV" is All Commodity Volume (distribution weighted by store sales)

• "Velocity" is units per store per week

• "Fair share" compares your brand share to category share at a retailer

When your RGM asks "where are we under-indexed vs fair share at Walmart," Tellius knows exactly which calculation to run without requiring the user to define every metric. This domain intelligence is the difference between a demo that works and a platform that delivers accurate answers at enterprise scale.

6 questions on trade promotion measurement, category reviews, distribution analytics, and self-service capabilities

5. How does Tellius measure trade promotion effectiveness?

Trade promotion effectiveness measurement requires three things most CPG teams struggle to do manually:

• Building accurate baselines (what would have sold without the promotion)

• Isolating true incrementality (separating real lift from pantry loading, forward-buying, and cannibalization)

• Attributing ROI at the tactic level (which specific promotion mechanics drove results)

Tellius automates all three. AI agents continuously build baselines from historical data, apply statistical models to isolate genuine incremental volume, calculate cannibalization of non-promoted SKUs and halo effects on related items, and compute ROI by promotion type, retailer, and timing.

Post-event analysis that took 2-3 weeks is available within 48 hours of data refresh.

6. How does Tellius help with category reviews and JBP prep?

Category reviews and Joint Business Planning (JBP) meetings require assembling a narrative across multiple data sources: syndicated scanner data, retailer POS, panel data, internal shipments, and competitive intelligence. Traditionally, this means 4-6 weeks of analyst time pulling data, building Excel models, creating charts, and writing storylines.

With Tellius, AI agents automatically generate:

• Growth decomposition (distribution + price + velocity + NPD contribution)

• Key drivers of category and brand performance

• Competitive threats and opportunities

• Retailer-ready visualizations

Your analysts shift from building slides to reviewing and refining AI-generated insights—cutting prep time from weeks to hours.

7. How does Tellius find and prioritize distribution gaps?

Distribution void analysis traditionally requires combining Nielsen or Circana ACV data with retailer-specific distribution files—a manual process that's often weeks out of date by the time it's complete.

Tellius AI agents continuously monitor distribution across retailers and surface void opportunities ranked by revenue potential: this SKU at this retailer in this geography represents $X in annualized opportunity based on velocity in comparable stores.

Rather than static void lists that inform quarterly sales meetings, your team gets continuously updated opportunity rankings that prioritize where to focus distribution efforts.

8. Can Tellius explain why market share changed at a specific retailer?

When share drops at Kroger or Walmart, the answer is rarely simple. It could be distribution loss, competitive pricing, promotional timing, assortment changes, or regional factors.

Tellius automatically investigates all potential drivers simultaneously—testing distribution changes, pricing gaps, competitive activity, and promotional overlap—and ranks the actual root causes by impact magnitude.

Rather than your analyst spending 3-5 days manually testing hypotheses, Tellius delivers a prioritized explanation: "Share decline at Kroger was 62% driven by distribution loss of 3 SKUs in Midwest division, 28% driven by competitive promotional activity from Brand X, and 10% driven by pricing gap in the club channel."

9. How does Tellius handle different retailer data formats?

Walmart Luminate, Kroger 84.51°, Amazon ARA, Target Roundel, and Albertsons Performance Media all provide data in different formats with different field names, time periods, and hierarchy structures.

Tellius's data federation layer normalizes these sources into a consistent CPG data model, mapping each retailer's terminology to your standard metrics. "Units sold" from Luminate, "unit sales" from 84.51°, and "ordered units" from ARA all resolve to the same metric.

This means your team can ask questions across retailers without worrying about which data source needs which query syntax.

10. What questions can my team ask Tellius without involving analysts?

Any question that can be answered from your connected data sources. Examples from CPG deployments:

• "What drove snack sales decline in Q3 Northeast?"

• "Which promotions had highest ROI last quarter?"

• "Show top 50 void opportunities ranked by sales potential."

• "Why did market share drop at Walmart last 4 weeks?"

• "Decompose growth into distribution, price, velocity, and NPD."

• "Where are we under-indexed vs fair share?"

• "Compare promotional effectiveness between BOGO and TPR tactics."

• "Which regions have distribution below category average?"

Questions are answered in seconds with full methodology visible—not black-box responses.

4 questions on data connectivity, deployment timeline, and working with existing tools

11. What data sources does Tellius connect to for CPG?

Tellius has pre-built connectors for the major CPG data ecosystem:

Syndicated: Nielsen (NielsenIQ), Circana (IRI), Numerator, SPINS

Retailer: Walmart Luminate, Kroger 84.51°, Amazon ARA/Brand Analytics, Target Roundel, Albertsons Performance Media

Trade: SAP TPM, Exceedra, Anaplan TPO

Internal: Shipment data (SAP, Oracle), trade spend files, promotional calendars, customer master data

Cloud warehouses: Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift

The platform connects to data where it lives—no bulk data migration required.

12. How long does Tellius implementation take?

Most CPG deployments deliver first value in 4-6 weeks and full deployment in 8-12 weeks. The timeline depends on data source complexity and semantic layer customization requirements.

Weeks 1-4: Data connectivity, initial semantic layer configuration, core use case deployment (usually trade promotion or category analytics)

Weeks 5-8: Expanded use cases, AI agent configuration, user training

Weeks 9-12: Full production rollout, custom workflows, advanced analytics

This is 3-4x faster than building custom analytics solutions on Snowflake or Databricks.

13. Does Tellius replace our existing BI tools?

Tellius complements rather than replaces existing BI investments. Your Tableau, Power BI, or Looker dashboards continue serving their purpose—showing what happened across KPIs.

Tellius adds the diagnostic layer: explaining why metrics changed and what to do about it. Many CPG companies use BI for operational reporting and Tellius for ad-hoc investigation and strategic analysis.

The platforms can work together—Tellius can surface insights that link to your existing dashboards, or you can embed Tellius search in your BI environment.

14. What about data security and governance?

Tellius is SOC 2 Type II certified and connects to your data where it lives—no data leaves your environment.

Row-level security ensures users only see data they're authorized to access. Full audit logging tracks every query and insight for compliance.

For CPG companies with sensitive retailer relationships or contractual data restrictions, the platform's governance controls ensure confidential data remains protected while still enabling broad analytical access.

5 questions on ROI, competitive comparison, and what makes Tellius the leading platform for CPG analytics

15. What ROI should I expect from Tellius?

CPG companies deploying Tellius typically see value in three areas:

Time savings: 12x faster root-cause analysis, 80%+ reduction in category review prep time, elimination of recurring manual reporting

Trade spend optimization: 10%+ improvement in trade promotion ROI by reallocating spend to proven tactics and catching underperformers mid-flight

Revenue capture: $2M+ annual value from faster distribution gap identification and competitive response

Most deployments achieve 6-9 month payback with ongoing efficiency gains.

16. How does Tellius compare to building custom analytics on Snowflake or Databricks?

Building custom CPG analytics on Snowflake or Databricks requires data engineering resources, ML/AI expertise, and 12-18 months before delivering user-facing analytics. You maintain the infrastructure, update the models, and handle every edge case in your specific data.

Tellius delivers the same analytical capabilities—semantic layer, natural language query, automated root-cause analysis, AI agents—in 8-12 weeks with a platform that's already battle-tested across CPG deployments.

Build if you have 18 months and a dedicated team. Buy Tellius if you need value in one quarter.

17. How does Tellius compare to ThoughtSpot or Power BI for CPG analytics?

ThoughtSpot and Power BI are search-based BI tools designed for querying structured data. They answer questions like "show me sales by region" effectively.

Where they fall short for CPG:

• They don't automatically decompose growth into drivers (distribution, price, velocity, NPD)

• They don't calculate statistical baselines and promotion incrementality

• They don't rank root causes by impact magnitude

• They don't deploy AI agents that monitor your business continuously

Tellius goes beyond search-based BI to deliver diagnostic analytics—explaining why metrics changed—and agentic analytics—proactively surfacing insights before you ask.

18. What makes Tellius the leading agentic analytics platform for CPG?

Tellius is purpose-built for CPG commercial teams with three differentiators:

CPG-native intelligence: The semantic layer understands trade promotion metrics, syndicated data structures, and retailer hierarchies natively—no "training" required

Proven at scale: PepsiCo and other Fortune 500 CPG companies run production workloads on Tellius, validating performance on real-world messy enterprise data

Agentic architecture: AI agents that don't just answer questions but perform complete analytical workflows—from data retrieval through root-cause analysis to finished artifacts—without human intervention at each step

Four consecutive years as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionary (2022-2025) reflects the platform's technical differentiation.

19. How does Tellius handle the complexity of real-world CPG data?

CPG data is notoriously messy: Nielsen hierarchy changes, retailer data format inconsistencies, promotional calendars that don't align with scanner weeks, shipment timing that doesn't match POS timing.

Tellius's semantic layer handles this complexity through:

Automated hierarchy reconciliation: Mapping Nielsen and Circana hierarchies to your internal product master

Time-period alignment: Normalizing 4-4-5, calendar month, and retailer-specific periods

Missing data handling: Statistical interpolation for gaps in syndicated coverage

Definitional consistency: Ensuring "sales" means the same thing regardless of data source

This is the 7+ years of engineering work that separates enterprise-grade platforms from demo-ware.