Transforming Retail Data into Answers with Conversational AI

Company

Private Limited

Domain

Strategic Merchandising & Analytics

Service

Conversational Analytics & Semantic-Layer Design

Technology

Problem Statement

Complex Enterprise Data Limited Self-Service Analytics

Retail business teams had access to extensive enterprise data across sales, orders, customers, products, invoices, and collections, but extracting meaningful answers often required technical expertise and support from BI teams. The complexity of the underlying Snowflake data model, varying levels of data granularity, and the need for consistently defined business metrics made self-service analytics difficult. As demand for faster, on-demand insights increased, the organization needed a secure and governed way for business users to interact with enterprise data using natural language—without compromising accuracy, transparency, or control.

Key challenges included:

Business users depended on BI teams for routine data questions.
Complex Snowflake schemas made self-service analytics difficult.
Business metrics such as revenue, open orders, and collection rate required precise definitions.
Data was distributed across multiple schemas and different levels of detail.
Frequent schema changes created challenges for AI-generated SQL.
Users needed transparency and confidence in AI-generated answers.
Connecting generative AI to production data required strong security controls.
Business definitions needed to evolve without requiring application redeployment.

Solution

Building a Governed Conversational Analytics Platform

Peramal designed and deployed a self-service conversational analytics application that enables business users to ask questions in plain English and receive governed, auditable answers directly from Snowflake.

The solution combines generative AI, a business-owned semantic layer, live schema information, and secure read-only data access.

The solution focused on:

Developed an “Ask AI” conversational analytics interface for natural-language business questions.
Designed a YAML-based semantic layer defining business metrics, rules, relationships, and SQL guidance.
Integrated Anthropic Claude to translate business questions into structured Snowflake SQL.
Injected live Snowflake information_schema metadata to improve SQL accuracy against the current schema.

Created a browser-based Schema Editor allowing the data team to update business definitions without redeploying the application.

Implemented strict structured output containing the SQL, answer, business insight, and chart specification.
Executed generated queries using a read-only Snowflake role.

Displayed generated SQL and result sets for transparency and verification.

Built a curated analytics dashboard with KPIs, charts, and recent-order information.

Deployed the application securely on Azure App Service.

Impact & Benefits

Improving release confidence across critical healthcare workflows

Improved release confidence through structured end-to-end QA coverage.

Reduced dependency on repetitive manual regression through automation.
Improved API and integration reliability through systematic validation.
Enabled earlier identification of functional and integration defects.
Increased regression coverage across critical healthcare workflows.
Enabled faster and more consistent validation of application enhancements.

Let's Get Your Project Started

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