Servy, which operates the Grab airport marketplace platform through which food, drinks and other products can be ordered, announced last week that it had doubled business in just the last year. Also announced was the launch of Servy Insights+, an engine driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that is designed to deliver consumer insights to businesses and airports that have implemented Servy services.
Servy’s 10 millionth order came at a Wendy’s operated by airport restaurateur Areas USA. It hit the 5 million landmark in the midst of the pandemic.
With operations in 1,000 locations in more than 80 airports, Servy now boasts a wide-reaching platform with data on thousands of transactions every day. This kind of information could be valuable to anyone operating a retail or restaurant location in an airport that uses Grab.
“We’ve always found that there’s a significant opportunity to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities,” said Jeff Livney, Servy’s chief experience officer. “Once we had more information about the guests across this network, the challenge has always been getting to a data size that you can actually leverage AI. We’ve finally hit this milestone where there’s an opportunity now to say ‘how do we leverage the data across the network?’ A guest is in one airport and then in another and we should be able to identify those guests and tailor the experience across that.”
The Insights platform has actually existed for some time now, according to Livney, but it was more used to monitor transactions that had already taken place a day or more previous. It took working together with airport and concessionaire partners to reach a large enough transactional base to tap into those insights and apply them across a wide base of operations.
“This has [so far] been more about collecting the data and getting a reactive view – being able to see that people are transacting across the network – but not anything in real time or changing the guest experience based on that. So, that’s what we’re starting to do now,” said Livney. “How can we personalize that experience across this large network? It takes a big data size to get there, and now that we’ve hit this metric that’s really the opportunity it presents.”
