Last week the Inference Group team attended RELEX Live London 2025, a fantastic event bringing together industry leaders, experts, and enthusiasts to discuss the latest innovations in supply chain optimisation and AI. As a fast-growing and industry leading company at the forefront of innovation in supply chain management, RELEX is transforming the retail, manufacturing and CPG sectors. Inference Group is proud to be a RELEX partner, helping customers enhance the data input to the RELEX platform, improving outcomes and reducing Time to Value.

Overall, the event was packed full of valuable insights into what’s coming next for RELEX’s platform, how the customer base is getting value from the platform and general discussions around the challenging journey of ensuring input data is of sufficient quality and can be automated to drive ML optimisation.

One of the standout panels was "Driving Profitability with AI," featuring Laurence Brenig-Jones, Alice Hamilton, David Hobbs, and Tommi Ylinen. The discussions highlighted the importance of compliance, security, and infrastructure in scaling AI solutions. Tommi Ylinen emphasised, "Data scientists can spin up an AI proof of concept pretty quickly, but if you want to scale and productionise your AI solution, you need compliance, security, and infrastructure in place to truly realise value."

We wouldn’t be a data and AI company if we also weren’t out in force with our basic AI Maturity Assessment, gathering data into the overall maturity of the conference attendees. Pooling all the results we see some interesting trends:

Across all 6 pillars in the Data & AI Maturity assessment, Risk & Governance was the highest scoring category on average

We are pleased to hear that across all the companies polled, many are focusing their efforts on ensuring their strategies are well-managed in terms of risk. At Inference Group, we understand the importance of good risk practice, and corporate governance to ensure you are doing right by your customers. Through our comprehensive AI Maturity Assessment, we can dive deeper into business areas to identify strengths and weaknesses, providing tailored recommendations to enhance governance and risk management.

Data maturity was the most diverse, with 40% of companies marking Data as their most mature category and another 40% marking it as their least mature category

Anyone who works with data and AI will know, the foundation to any successful solution is having good, clean and automated inputs. The 40% of companies that have invested time in having a comprehensive master data management structure can now fully realise the potential that RELEX has to offer.

At Inference Group, our data experts have over 25 years of experience in AI and Data and through our Engineering programme, we can design personalised, scalable solutions for RELEX users that automate data ingestion, comprehension, and quality checking using AI and Advanced Analytics. By streamlining these critical processes, we help RELEX customers accelerate their Time to Value, unlocking faster, more impactful decision-making and operational efficiency.

Across all 6 pillars in the Data & AI Maturity assessment, People & Culture was the lowest scoring category on average

Without the required training on the AI tools companies are using, the full potential of any AI strategy cannot be realised. At Inference Group, we have a structured Executive Training programme that helps to ensure those leading the company have a solid understanding of their strategy, and what their responsibilities are as an Exec.

Only 20% of companies had an above industry benchmark in overall maturity

Though some companies excelled in multiple of our 6 pillars, we see only 20% of companies score consistently above industry benchmark across. Our industry benchmark is based on a wider group of companies that participated in the survey in 2024.

Ultimately, without a holistic approach to AI strategy, the full benefits of any data and AI solution will not be realised. We encourage all companies to sign up for a full AI Maturity Assessment, to gain valuable insights into areas for improvement and also receive a personalised roadmap to build your AI capabilities, ensuring you are able to rapidly deploy and integrate solutions such as RELEX.

For more information about how Inference Group can help you, please reach out today!