Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract.
Business teams want the AI. You vet the implementation. Ward starts read-only, runs on policy, and hands you every artifact you need before signature: architecture, contracts, and references, all on the table.
Vendor C billed above the active price list. The overage is recoverable.
invoice.line | 1,200 units at $4.28; contract clause 3.2(b) sets $4.12 |
|---|---|
dispute.amount | $0.16 per unit, $192 total, classified as off-contract pricing |
Nine SKU-store pairs cross the predicted-zero threshold inside 48 hours. Store 22 produce is the most urgent.
forecast.daily | Lettuce at Store 22: 84 units/day against 38 on hand, zero by 11a Thursday |
|---|---|
supplier.lead | Regional DC lead time 18 hours, no sufficient PO already in transit |
Ranked on GMROI and velocity together, not units alone, so profitable slow movers survive the cut.
gmroi.sku | 412 SKUs below $0.90 GMROI holding $1.8M in working capital |
|---|---|
assortment.gap | 31 SKUs selling in the urban cluster are unstocked in a demographically matched cluster |
Three stores in the ten-store cluster breach the 2% threshold on one SKU. The cause is upstream, not theft.
shrink.rate | Stores 4, 11, 19 at 2.4–3.1% against a 1.2% cluster baseline |
|---|---|
delivery.defect | All three take delivery from the same lane, defect rate 4.8% above goal |
What lands on your desk
when the business buys AI.
Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract.
Business sponsor saw the demo. You have a week to vet a vendor you didn't pick
AI vendors price by seats and tokens. Total cost is unknowable until invoice three
Multi-year commits with auto-renew. No exit if the pilot stalls
Renewals come back 30% higher, with no room to push back and no benchmark to cite
Security and DPA reviews start after the team has already committed
Source: Gartner
How Ward earns
the sign-off.
- ×Business sponsor saw the demo. You have a week to vet a vendor you didn't pick
- ×AI vendors price by seats and tokens. Total cost is unknowable until invoice three
- ×Multi-year commits with auto-renew. No exit if the pilot stalls
- ×Renewals come back 30% higher, with no room to push back and no benchmark to cite
- ✓MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II underway, and architecture review available before signature
- ✓Month-to-month contracts. No multi-year lock-in. No auto-renew traps
- ✓Free to deploy. 5% of model compute on your own keys, and nothing per seat
- ✓14-day insight guarantee. If Ward doesn't deliver, setup is refunded and no compute fee is billed
MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II underway, and architecture review available before signature
Month-to-month contracts. No multi-year lock-in. No auto-renew traps
Free to deploy. 5% of model compute on your own keys, and nothing per seat
14-day insight guarantee. If Ward doesn't deliver, setup is refunded and no compute fee is billed
AI strategy, orchestration and reporting-layer work in enterprise grocery at nine-figure revenue. Reference calls available before signature
From signature
to running insights.
A live pilot for procurement teams hits these milestones on real data, on a fixed-fee schedule.
How the deal is structured.
No multi-year commits. No auto-renew. No license. Ward is free to deploy and bills 5% of the model compute it uses. Exit any time. Every artifact you need to vet a vendor is available before signature.
Policy, scope and audit in full →- Month-to-month, no auto-renew
- Usage-based pricing
- 14-day insight guarantee
- Pre-signature artifacts
- References available
- Insurance and indemnity
The product your
business teams will use.
Reporting
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.
| Model | Horizon | MAPE |
|---|---|---|
holt_winters | 4wk | 4.1% |
arima_sarimax | 13wk | 8.9% |
gbm_demand | 1wk | 2.1% |
bayes_hier | new store | 11.4% |
Sources
Connect external systems. Ward AI maps the schema and drafts the cleaning rules.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
sap_pos_transactions | import | 2m ago |
sap_inventory_shrinkage | import | 2m ago |
sap_labor_scheduling | import | 14m ago |
retail_inventory_weekly | import | 1h ago |
retail_google_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_meta_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_ga4_website_daily | import | 1h ago |
Architecture
Two ways to connect. Federate against your live systems, or ingest into Ward’s data lake. Toggle below.
sap.posretail.inventory_weeklyPolicies
Cedar access policies for your tenant. Ward AI drafts; you approve before anything binds.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
finance-read-shrinkage | permit | Model::"inventory_shrinkage" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
region-west-only | permit | Tenant::"acme" |
Procurement packet: MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II status (underway), architecture review, and reference contacts. Free to deploy, 5% of compute. Month-to-month. 14-day insight guarantee. Available before signature.
What the business teams
get, and what it runs on.
Retail verticals
Insight typesThe first three are where this role usually starts.
Metrics Ward moves
Platform pieces this role leans on
Systems Ward connects toRead-only by default.
Operator stories
and the alternatives.
What it costs, and when you know if it worked.
Read-only for the first six weeks. A measured KPI delta by day 90, whichever way it goes.
-
48 hoursFirst insight cards
From a read-only connection. Findings on your own data, not a sandbox and not a slide.
-
Week 2Findings ranked by dollars
Stores, SKUs and vendors ranked by what they cost you, with the cause named and the SQL one click under every number.
-
Week 6First gated write
One playbook, one system of record, blocked on an approver role you named. Everything before this is read-only.
-
Day 90The number, either way
Measured KPI delta against the metric agreed on day one. If it did not move, the pilot ends.
Ward makes money one way: 5% of the model compute that routes through it, metered on your own provider keys and billed monthly in arrears. No license, no seats, no platform fee. Setup is a one-time package if you want a named engineer for training and guidance, and it starts at $0.
- 5% of model spend, the only recurring fee
- Setup from $0, invoiced once
- Cancel any time, 30 days notice
Two ways to start.
Run a read-only proof on your stack, or have advisory walk you through architecture.
Playbooks for Procurement.
The playbooks this team runs on Ward.
Control AI spend by department and user.
Without skimping on the outcome.
Give every department and every user a compute budget. Ward routes each question to the cheapest model that clears the quality bar, so finance caps the spend without capping what the business gets back.
Evaluating this for a retail IT estate? The six-week onboarding path sets out what connects each week and what you sign off at every gate, and the evaluation packet is built to forward to security and procurement.
Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract.
Architecture review, MSA, DPA, SOC 2 II report, on the table before you sign.
Read-only to start · your LLM keys · SOC 2 Type II underway · or book a call directly
Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches, and the ones your current tools miss.