As 2026 Planning Season Begins, Retailers Pilot the Predictive Retail LLM to Optimize Holiday Decisions and Next-Season Assortments
Pittsburgh, PA (October 8, 2025) – First Insight, the company that leverages AI to transform consumer feedback into profitable retail strategies, today announced the beta release of Ellis, its new AI growth copilot powered by the first predictive retail large language model (LLM). Several major retailers are piloting Ellis during the holiday season–the most competitive and margin-sensitive cycle of the year–to get instant answers that guide holiday pricing and promotional moves, while shaping assortment and planning decisions for 2026.
Ellis acts as a conversational copilot for First Insight’s proven decision intelligence platform, allowing retailers to ask questions in natural language and receive AI-powered predictive answers in seconds. Instead of sifting through dashboards or static reports, retail teams can use Ellis to evaluate product concepts, pricing thresholds and demand forecasts on the fly—and make confident decisions in time to impact both holiday performance and upcoming assortments.
First Insight’s customers will have access to the beta version of Ellis throughout the holiday season and before the AI copilot’s official, public launch in January 2026. They will be able to put Ellis to the test across all five factors that disproportionately influence retail growth:
1. Strategic planning–from concept to customer. Working side-by-side with Ellis, retailers will be able to spot whitespace opportunities, forecast demand and stress-test every single decision they make–before they make it. And they’ll be able to do it faster: compressing 6 to 9-month trend-to-market windows down to as little as 2 to 4 weeks.
2. Validating products, assortments and merchandising. Even the most seasoned retailers are regularly surprised to find that what they think shoppers want can differ from what they actually buy. Ellis will bridge this gap by surfacing consumer sentiment that either validates–or invalidates–their concepts and assortments before burning budget.
3. Predicting pricing and making markdowns with margins in mind. Ellis can quickly access insights into how much shoppers would realistically pay for each product, what their pricing threshold is, and how they’re most likely to react to simulated promotions. Ellis can also analyze price elasticity to show retailers which products are most sensitive to price changes and which are more resilient—helping them plan markdowns accordingly while still protecting their margins.
4. Forecasting demand with precision. Ellis can help retailers carefully predict their inventory needs and streamline their supply chains by aligning buys and allocations with realistic demand.
5. Going to market better and selling more. Through the Ellis interface, retailers can test their creative, visual displays and campaigns directly against predictive consumer signals before launching campaigns and products at scale.
“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.”
Ellis builds on First Insight’s deep expertise in helping retailers analyze consumer and product decision data across thousands of products and categories—from apparel and footwear to home goods, grocery, C-Store, QSR and CPG. Unlike generic AI trained on scraped web text, Ellis is purpose-built as a Retail LLM, designed to translate consumer feedback, trends, market signals, competitive pricing and customer sentiment into practical answers for assortment planning, inventory alignment, pricing strategies and go-to-market execution. For retailers under pressure to move faster, reduce risk and defend margins, Ellis represents the first AI copilot built specifically to deliver measurable retail outcomes.
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About First Insight
First Insight is a global retail platform that uses its native AI to turn real-time customer feedback into profitable strategies for more than 600+ brands and retailers. Companies like Under Armour, Woolworths and Family Dollar rely on First Insight to understand what consumers will buy, what they won’t, how much they’re willing to pay, and how these and other factors directly influence planning, inventory and margins. First Insight further transforms customer feedback into a Value Score™, assigned to every single product it gains insight on. These scores accurately predict the viability of and demand for products so that retailers can confidently make design, pricing and inventory decisions that will deliver measurable financial impact. The company’s Voice of the Customer Platform is central to its offering and boasts a network of 360+ million consumers spanning 180 countries and 67 languages and currencies. First Insight was founded in 2007.
