An unmanned coffee house in London, the Honest Café, has started using Watson Analytics to get insight about its customers.
Honest Café is the brainchild of UK based food and drink vending equipment maker Revive Vending, presently operating in three locations in the UK capital.
The Cafe does not have employees, instead it has high-end vending machines which offers healthy snacks, locally sourced and low-calorie organic options, juices, baked vegetable snacks, and fruit teas.
Though the absence of manual service reduces the overall cost, it does make understanding the needs of clients a bit difficult for the company.
The vending machines were able to capture insights through information derived from product sales and selections, timing of purchases and other factors, but it was not delivering the desired results from the transactional files.
IBM claims that the lack of clear insight made the company look for alternatives and it chose IBM’s natural language-based analytics service, Watson Analytics, which allows fast access to powerful, predictive and visual analytics.
Honest Café head of product development said that by combining Watson Analytics and Twitter data the company is being able to get better insight on consumer choice and predict what customers wanted to buy.
IBM Watson Analytics vice president Marc Altshuller said: "Honest Café is a great example of how young new businesses are leveraging predictive analytics for the first time to make better, more strategic business decisions.
"The company is harnessing the power of Watson Analytics to not only be responsive, but proactive."
