More than 50 data and analytics professionals from across MOL Group Retail and Digital Factory gathered in Budapest for our biggest ever Analytics Summit to reflect on our progress, align on future priorities, and explore the next chapter of Data & AI in Retail. The event focused on three key themes: providing world-class analytics services, AI acceleration, and strengthening our analytics community.
Over the past years, analytics has become a core part of MOL Retail's digital ecosystem. Today, our business applications drive business decisions across sales & operations, loyalty & personalization, workforce optimization and category management, delivering growing business impact and transforming business processes across the Group. While our self-service BI reporting and analytics capability is used every day by more than 2000 colleagues across markets, providing instant access to business insights crafted from billions of transactional and customer data available in our central data platform.
A major focus of the Summit was our transition to a future-ready analytics architecture built on Databricks. This transformation will provide the scalability, governance, AI capabilities, and self-service foundation needed to support the next generation of analytics solutions and accelerate innovation across Retail. It is not surprising that AI was a central topic throughout the two days. Participants reviewed how AI is already being embedded into business applications through predictive analytics, automated insights, and personalization capabilities, while the discussions also looked beyond today's capabilities toward agentic and autonomous systems that will increasingly connect insights with recommended actions and closed-loop business performance improvement.
One of the most anticipated sessions was the "Talk-to-Your-Data" AI Hackathon, where participants experienced how conversational AI and AI-powered BI can make data exploration and insight generation faster and more intuitive. The Summit also included a dedicated workshop on the future of AI-ready self-service analytics, helping define how business users can interact with data more naturally while maintaining governance and consistency.
The event was honored to host Dileep Thomas, former Director of Data Analytics for Bacardi North America. Drawing on more than 25 years of international Data & AI leadership experience, he shared valuable perspectives on how organizations can successfully translate Data & AI investments into tangible business value. Many of the challenges and opportunities he described closely mirror our own journey, reinforcing our conviction that we are heading in the right direction.
Looking ahead, the ambition is clear: move beyond standalone analytics tools toward an integrated, AI-enabled ecosystem that continuously connects insights, recommendations, actions, and business outcomes, while unlocking the power of AI-assisted self-service analytics. With significant opportunities still ahead, the Summit reinforced that the future of Retail analytics will be built through the combination of advanced technology, strong business partnership, and a vibrant analytics community.
