A retail executive uses First Insight’s Ellis AI copilot to guide pricing and product planning decisions. Image Source: ChatGPT-5
Major Retailers Pilot First Insight’s Predictive AI Copilot Ellis Ahead of 2026
Key Takeaways: First Insight’s Ellis AI Copilot
First Insight has launched the beta of Ellis, a predictive Retail LLM that serves as a conversational AI copilot.
Several major retailers are testing Ellis during the 2025 holiday season ahead of its January 2026 public release.
Ellis helps retailers optimize pricing, promotions, product lineups, and demand forecasting.
The AI tool aims to compress planning cycles from 6–9 months down to as little as 2–4 weeks.
Ellis builds on First Insight’s Voice of the Customer Platform, which aggregates insights from 360+ million consumers in 180 countries.
AI in Retail: Major Retailers Pilot First Insight’s Predictive Copilot Ellis
As retailers head into the 2026 planning season, several major brands are piloting Ellis, the new AI growth copilot from First Insight, designed to transform how companies plan product lineups, pricing, and promotions. The beta rollout of Ellis marks the debut of what First Insight calls the first predictive retail large language model (LLM)—a system purpose-built to turn customer feedback and market signals into actionable retail decisions in real time.
“Retail doesn’t win on intuition anymore,” said Greg Petro, CEO of First Insight. “Ellis turns signals into decisions—on product, price and promotions—at the moment retailers need them most and with a competitive understanding never before available. It’s about speed with confidence: protecting margins, finding growth and staying in step with customers as they shift.”
First Insight’s retail partners will have access to the beta version of Ellis throughout the 2025 holiday season, ahead of the AI copilot’s full public launch in January 2026.
Inside Ellis: The Predictive Retail Copilot
Ellis operates as a conversational copilot within First Insight’s decision intelligence platform, allowing retailers to ask questions in natural language and receive AI-powered, predictive, data-backed answers within seconds. Instead of relying on static dashboards, retail teams can interact directly with Ellis to evaluate product concepts, pricing thresholds, and demand forecasts—enabling faster, more confident decisions that directly influence holiday performance and next-season product lineups.
The beta release allows participating retailers to test Ellis across five key areas of retail growth:
Strategic Planning: Retailers can identify whitespace opportunities, forecast demand, and stress-test decisions—cutting traditional go-to-market timelines from months to weeks.
Product Validation: Ellis helps teams confirm whether product and assortment concepts align with real consumer sentiment before committing budgets.
Pricing and Promotions: The system evaluates how consumers respond to different price points, pricing thresholds, and promotions—determining pricing elasticity and margin protection strategies.
Demand Forecasting: Ellis refines inventory planning and supply chain alignment by predicting realistic demand patterns.
Go-to-Market Execution: Retailers can test creative assets, visual displays, and campaigns against predictive consumer signals before full-scale rollout.
Built for Retail: The First Predictive Retail LLM
Unlike general-purpose AI models trained on scraped internet data, Ellis is trained specifically for retail applications, drawing from First Insight’s proprietary consumer decision data across thousands of products and customer sentiment in categories such as apparel, footwear, grocery, home goods, QSR, and CPG.
This targeted training enables Ellis to translate real consumer feedback, pricing trends, and market signals into specific, actionable recommendations for product planning, pricing, and marketing execution. The company positions Ellis as the first AI copilot designed to deliver measurable retail outcomes—helping retailers move faster, reduce risk, and defend margins in a competitive environment.
First Insight’s Platform and Reach
Founded in 2007, First Insight now supports over 600 global retailers and brands, including Under Armour, Woolworths, and Family Dollar. The company’s Voice of the Customer Platform collects insights from a network of 360+ million consumers, covering 180 countries and 67 languages.
Its proprietary Value Score™ assigns a predictive rating to every product tested, allowing retailers to anticipate performance, optimize pricing, and align inventory with projected demand.
Q&A: Understanding First Insight’s Ellis
Q1: What is Ellis?
A: Ellis is First Insight’s AI growth copilot, powered by a predictive retail large language model (LLM) that helps retailers make data-driven product, pricing, and demand decisions.
Q2: Who is testing Ellis?
A: Several major retailers are piloting Ellis during the 2025 holiday season ahead of its public launch in January 2026.
Q3: How does Ellis improve decision-making?
A: Ellis provides instant predictive insights via conversational prompts, reducing planning cycles and improving confidence in product, pricing, and promotional decisions.
Q4: What makes Ellis different from other AI tools?
A: Unlike generic AI, Ellis is built as a retail-specific LLM trained on proprietary consumer and product decision data across thousands of categories.
Q5: What is First Insight’s broader impact in retail?
A: First Insight helps more than 600 retailers worldwide translate customer feedback into profitable strategies using AI-driven decision intelligence.
What This Means: AI-Driven Retail Planning Becomes Reality
The pilot of Ellis marks a pivotal step in retail’s ongoing shift from intuition-led decision-making to data-driven, AI-assisted planning. By combining predictive analytics with conversational interaction, First Insight is giving merchants and planners an operational edge—helping them act on insights in seconds rather than months.
For retailers under mounting margin pressure, Ellis could become the blueprint for next-generation merchandising, where AI copilots continuously translate consumer signals into smarter, faster, and more confident business moves.
Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant used for research and drafting. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.