The technology is built on Google Cloud’s Looker platform and powered by Gemini.The technology is built on Google Cloud’s Looker platform and powered by Gemini.
There’s no such thing as a dumb question—especially at Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&Co.).
On Thursday, the denim giant introduced conversational analytics, a new capability that allows employees to query the company’s data in their common language and receive secure, accurate and immediate answers. LS&Co. said the technology will fundamentally shift how its employees interact with data and how decisions are made as a business.
“Two years ago, our analytics environment was fragmented, slow and reactive. Today, we operate from a single, reliable data foundation that has made our team five times faster at delivering analytics to the business,” said Aman Talib, LS& Co. merchandising planning and inventory management. “Conversational analytics is the next step in that journey. For our planners, they’re no longer stuck digging through dashboards or waiting in analyst queues; their answers are a question away.”
Built on Google Cloud’s Looker platform and powered by Gemini, LS&Co.’s conversational analytics capability allows employees to ask business questions the same way they would ask a colleague. For example, a merchandising executive can access sell-out performance for owned and operated stores across a certain week, and a planner can query inventory levels by product category using the same internal shorthand they use every day.
LS& Co. said the system “understands our unique internal terminology, business context and data definition,” enabling employees across the organization to access and act on data instantly—not just those with deep analytical expertise.
Conversational analytics is another steppingstone in LS&Co.’s journey to become a journey to become a data-driven, consumer-centric business.
The San Francisco-based company launched an internal data and analytics platform in 2024. Now, more than 2,200 LS&Co. employees across the company are active on platform and have used it to build over 70 data products, enabling teams across merchandising, planning, retail operations and e-commerce to operate from a single source of knowledge.
The foundational infrastructure has been making an impact across the company. LS&Co. described how its Merchandising Planning and Inventory Management (MPIM) organization was an early adopter of the platform, testing and helping refine our data and analytic capabilities.
Before the internal data and analytics platform, the MPIM team’s analytics environment was defined by fragmentation. Seven separate data structures siloed critical information, manual data validation was slow and error-prone, and reactive analytics made it difficult to get ahead of the business.
Now, LS&Co. said the team operates more efficiently with streamlined data, faster insights and the ability to proactively support business decisions.
“We’re turning data into insight at scale,” said Vinay Narayana, senior director of Data & AI Platform Engineering at LS&Co. “The introduction of conversational analytics is proof that we are no longer just building infrastructure, but we are putting that infrastructure to work in ways that directly accelerate our transformation into a world-class, direct-to-consumer business.”
At the Semafor conference in Washington, D.C. last month, CEO Michelle Gass emphasized how the company is taking cues from its tech-focused Bay Area neighbors when it comes to harnessing fast-moving technological advancements.
Last year, the company partnered with Microsoft to develop an integrated agentic AI platform to help “rewire and automate” workflows across global IT, human resources, operations and more. It’s store associates also utilize Stitch, the company’s version of ChatGPT that pulls from Levi’s internal database of product information and training materials to provide them with answers to basically any question they or a shopper might have within seconds.
