Vending machines have never been smarter.

With a stellar reputation for exploring hidden consumer patterns to help Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers and retailers drive new, steadier profits, no wonder Sydney-based company HIVERY won over global names like The Coca-Cola Company and Japan’s JR East Water Business.

Their innovative approach, driven by their catchy motto “Data has a better idea”, has disrupted the world’s data economy.

HIVERY knows that the only constant in the world is change. In today’s volatile landscape, that change happens faster and more frequently than it used to.

Disruption drives innovation and those loathe to invest in innovations are falling behind. This is the problem HIVERY seeks to fix by harnessing the power of their unique artificial intelligence (AI) framework, which they aptly call Prescriptive Science.

And they did not stop there.

Determined to support optimal decision-making, HIVERY went a step further and combined Prescriptive Analytics with Human-Centered Design (HCD) principles to unpack individual business constraints and develop personalised and “empathic” solutions.

To prevent organisations from surrendering industry leadership to more nimble challengers, HIVERY has been investing time and resources into reading and predicting current and future consumer trends, respectively, to help companies better understand customers, supply chains, and emerging opportunities. This also allows them to optimise or overhaul existing systems — eventually generating significant returns on retail space investments.

These prescriptive analytics tools introduced a “new species of thinking” that generates highly reliable, easy-to-implement recommendations regarding product assortment, price, promotion, and space allocation.

While there are numerous organisations leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning to analyse data, they have yet to hold a candle to how practical and actionable HIVERY’s recommendations have been.

Indeed, HIVERY’s leap into the global stratosphere is thanks to an ingenious strategy — one significantly influenced by their uniquely Australian background.

How HIVERY Rolls: Discover, Experiment, Deploy

HIVERY recognises the importance of continuous research and development in managing impact, project timeframes, and stakeholder expectations. Using their Discover-Experiment-Deploy strategy, they are able to get high-level clarity, which allows them to move from “Where do we start?” to optimal funnel clarity, and ultimately, to real-world business solutions.

Using this innovative approach, HIVERY successfully created a few pioneering products, including Vending Analytics (the world’s first AI SaaS software for operators), Promotional Effectiveness (a software that uses AI to optimise promotional pricing schedules of CPG companies within seconds), and Space Assortment Manager (the world’s first AI category management application).

So, what do these approaches mean and how have they helped HIVERY in pulling off major disruptive innovations in their industry? Let’s look at the details.

Discover: “What Can We Solve?”

This is where it all starts. Australia has heavily championed levering research to inform policies, evolve existing industries, and develop new sectors to ensure long-term future success. This way of working has fostered a nationwide culture where every private or public entity discards legacy thinking and deep-dives into the real issues using an agile lens.

This is the foundation that HIVERY is built on and the reason why its founders were given the opportunity to create their pioneering programs in the first place.

HIVERY was born thanks to The Coca-Cola Founders Platform, wherein the industry giant partnered with experienced Australia-based entrepreneurs Franki Chamaki and Jason Hosking in setting up a big data hackathon. This paved the way for the discovery of interesting IP and talents, including Data61/CSIRO experts Dr. Charles Gretton, Dr. Matthew Robards, and Dr. Menkes van den Briel.

The technology that sprung from this innovation-centred culture paved the way toward creating HIVERY’s self-learning algorithms, which changed the course of the entire vending machine industry entirely by pinpointing long-going issues and addressing them with just a few clicks.

Experiment: “How Can We Prove It’s Working?”

Strategic risks go hand in hand with innovation — a way of life that Australian business leaders have fully embraced. Without taking these risks, companies will never know if their “crazy” idea can thrive in the modern landscape. Because of this, business leaders have finessed how they manage risk and have found efficient ways to leverage it in making better business decisions.

One way they do this is through constant market experimentation. HIVERY has established a methodology to validate their riskiest assumptions or questions as quickly and as cheaply as possible. To test their theories, they use their minimum viable product (MVP) as a tool to avoid lengthy and unnecessary work altogether.

Using the consumer insights they gather from experimenting with their MVPs, HIVERY iterates their products piece by piece until they end up with an amazingly seamless product that is optimised for their clients to utilise.

Thanks to this robust and well-proven methodology and an environment fit for such market experiments to fly, HIVERY has produced some of its most disruptive and innovative products yet.

Deploy: “How Can We Scale?”

HIVERY puts a heavy focus on determining how their existing and future users are going to interact with and use AI models to achieve their respective goals. In effect, they also seek to understand how each company will embed, monitor, and improve new solutions into its existing processes and culture — if they are to stay on top.

This should be easy for Australian adopters of HIVERY software since the nation’s workforce, at its core, readily embraces a culture of innovation and new ways of working to carve a path toward tremendous transformation and growth.

And it does not just stop in Australia. Now that HIVERY has branched out to Japan, the US, and the UK, this truly Australian brand of working is set to make believers out of their international adopters as well.

No doubt, HIVERY has successfully leveraged their home country’s resources and influences, enabling them to explore what is possible instead of sticking to restrictive ways of working. By continuously discovering, experimenting, and deploying with AI and machine learning, they have nowhere to go but up.

This article is the third instalment to our “Taking Brand Australia Global” series. Keep posted next time as we explore how other renowned Australian scale-ups like ModiBodi, Archie Rose, Spacer, and BlueShyft set themselves up for global success.