How AI Loyalty Transforms Grocery And Retail

The most valuable loyalty program isn’t a points card—it’s a living system that knows each shopper, adapts in real time, and proves it can drive incremental spend. We sit down with Jeff Baskin, Chief Revenue Officer at Eagle Eye, to unpack how unified commerce and true one-to-one personalization are reshaping grocery, convenience, and hospitality. Instead of stitching tools together, Jeff explains how a single platform that connects payments, promotions, loyalty, and engagement unlocks a complete customer view and makes every interaction feel relevant across channels.

Jeff pulls back the curtain on two standout case studies. Giant Eagle combined loyalty with digital promotions to generate hundreds of millions in incremental sales by influencing the next purchase, not just rewarding the last. Tesco’s AI challenges push personalization further: models weigh 190+ decisions per shopper to assign tailored goals and rewards, scaling from 3 million to 10 million customers quickly while guaranteeing measurable uplift. These programs win CPG support because they tie spend to clear ROI, not vague impressions, and they help retailers grow margin by moving shoppers into higher-value behaviors.

We also get practical about the messy middle: data silos, legacy POS programs, and organizational friction. Jeff shares why a consultative approach matters—start with customer outcomes, treat data as a strategic asset, and build a feedback loop that improves with every transaction. We compare Walmart’s tech-driven experience gains with the edge regional grocers can reclaim by pairing human connection with AI-powered relevance. The takeaway is simple: personalization works because it mirrors how people already consume content on Netflix and Instagram. When retailers deliver that level of relevance across store and digital, loyalty stops being a cost and becomes a growth engine.

Subscribe, share with a colleague who cares about loyalty, and tell us: where are your silos, and what would you test first?

Chapters

• 0:01 Tech Investments Change Customer Experience
• 0:47 Meet Jeff Baskin Of Eagle Eye
• 1:47 Eagle Eye’s Evolution And Reach
• 4:03 From Omnichannel To Unified Commerce
• 6:46 What Unified Commerce Really Means
• 8:44 Breaking Silos With Data And Loyalty
• 9:55 Giant Eagle And Tesco AI Challenges
• 14:58 Proving Personalization At Scale
• 17:28 Advisory Approach And True 1:1
• 19:33 Why Personalization Works For Shoppers
• 21:48 The Fast-Moving Retail Stack
• 24:03 Start With Customer Outcomes
• 26:01 Walmart, Regionals, And The Experience Gap

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Well, they have invested so much money in technology that they have significantly improved the overall customer experience. And frankly, that has helped them bridge the gap to call it the regional grocer who I go to my, you know, I go to my grocery store across the street. I know the produce guy, I know the butcher, I know the people that are checking me out. And that was kind of the draw to that, um, to that retailer why I kept going back. And um now these regional grocers, these other types of retailers have their AI is giving them the ability to have technology to continue to improve their overall customer experience.

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Today on Customer Land, I'm with Jeff Baskin, Chief Revenue Officer at EagleEye. Jeff and I, as it turned out, have a lot of mutual acquaintances because I guess that's just the way this small space works. But um surprised that we haven't actually physically bumped into one another before now, but been looking forward to this sometime. Jeff, thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07

Yeah, thanks a lot, Mike, and uh really appreciate you having me on uh the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12

So I've spoken to uh Tim Mason, CEO at Eagle Eye, a handful of times. He's been on the podcast. So uh for longtime listeners, they've they probably have some idea of what Eagle Eye was when we were talking, but there's been evolutions of Eagle Eyes, uh, your product offering, kind of your market approach um over that period of time. So maybe it would be helpful just to hear in your words what Eagle Eye is all about, yeah, what you're doing in the marketplace right now, and maybe a little bit more about your role there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:46

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Eagle Eye has been around for almost 20 years now, um, based in the UK, um, headquartered in London there. And um, we are, you know, again, it's evolved quite a bit, but we've really become um an AI personalization and loyalty platform um that covers kind of all areas of personalized marketing and loyalty for retailers. Um, our core group of retail clients that we have today is in kind of grocery and convenience and fuel retail and hospitality, I will call it. Um we've got um offices all over the world and um some of the largest retailers in the world on essentially all continents, um, from uh Woolies in Australia to Lobla in Canada um to virtually everyone in in the UK and France. So um proven solutions over a very long period of time. And you mentioned you know Tim Mason, who's former CMO at Tesco and built club card challenges and is is uh highly regarded as you know the godfather of loyalty in some circles, as as you've probably seen, Mike. Um, and it's just uh we've got a great great culture at the company, and that really uh exudes down to kind of how we we take care of our customers and um and don't really like to call them customers, but more partners, and that's what we really do is have a consultative approach to strategic partnerships, as I would like to call it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:19

I guess what I'm wondering is you know, the the whole world, including uh Eagle Eye at some point, were loyalty technology providers or incentive providers. And I feel like through this conversation and other channels, that Eagle Eye is much more than that now. You're taking a broader approach to customer engagement. Can you just unpack that a little bit, if I'm even right?

SPEAKER_01: 3:43

Yeah, I mean, I think you you are certainly. And and and and you mentioned Tim's experience and what he's you know, what he's done, what he did at Tesco um over the over the years. I mean, Tim's Tim's forgotten more about loyalty, you know, than I'll ever know. And I've been doing retail technology for for close to 25 years now in different capacities. Um, but I think it it it really goes back to um what I've referred to in in articles that I've written on on kind of unified commerce and kind of how all of this retail technology comes together. Where I think before um, you know, years ago, you know, you built your e-commerce site, you had you had your in-store, and they were literally completely separate channels of uh marketing and sales. And now then you had kind of omnichannel commerce, and then that has kind of evolved into into what I'll call unified commerce. And um those that have stayed in these you know silos have really um fallen behind, um, I'll say. And retailers that have really adopted this kind of singular format or unified commerce where it's really built on data. And I had this one view of the customer, and whether they're in store, whether they're online, whether they're at the gas pump, um, I have a singular view of the customer. And um, you know, the like to say like that, you know, the silos that that we're in are like it's like running three separate kitchens in a restaurant. You know, your your fry cook doesn't know what the grill cook is doing, and the customer gets a cold hamburger. Um if we're not talking to each other. So that's a real much simplified version of of what we're trying to accomplish at like, you know, for instance, at Eagle Eye and solving these very large complex problems that grocers and convenience stores have and in getting to the next level and and frankly competing with you know the Walmarts of the world.

SPEAKER_00: 5:38

Right. Well, the analogy works really well. The three kitchens, yeah. You know, I think even a lay person can understand it, the the issues there. Yeah, I want to I want to split hairs for a minute if we can, because uh for the longest time and still even now, there are lots of people out there talking about omni-channel approaches to customer engagement. And um you don't hear as much as anymore, but it was it was the buzzword, it was the thing that everybody was going for and moving hard towards. I mean, I'd say maybe even up to I'm making this up, but three years ago. And Eagle Eyes talking about something now that's a little bit different, and you know, is there a difference between omnichannel and unified commerce? Is it this and again, I'm not pointing fingers, but is it the same thing with different label, or are what what you're what you're describing, is that more of a data view, uh unified data view than anything else? Help me to understand that.

SPEAKER_01: 6:41

Yeah, if you talk to all the people that you mentioned that we know in each other's networks, you'd probably get a few different answers on this. Um I think the you know, the unified commerce isn't just it's not just stitching systems together with duct tape, it's a it's a single platform where loyalty, payments, promotions, customer engagement, personalization are all talking to each other in real time. And it's it's creating a personalized and marketing shopping experience, is what I would say. And um retailers can gain an absolute complete view of the individual shopper and can consistently deliver seamless services, whether that be you know, BOPUS or buy online pickup in store, curbside pickup, um cross-channel returns is a big one. And you know, and then obviously, you know, more importantly, for Eagle Eye is you know the personalized loyalty type experiences and um experiences create loyalty and having unified commerce capabilities is how retailers are able to deliver those experiences.

SPEAKER_00: 7:44

One of the things that comes up very often in these kinds of conversations, and you just touched on it, is the idea that there are still a lot of organizations out there, especially the big ones, who are operating in operational silos, data silos, even kind of cultural silos, which are all impediments to getting the you know the big job done. Um, and I think we brought this up in an earlier conversation with Tim, but but that's been a while ago. I'd love to hear your take on how EagleEye is approaching the existence of these kinds of silos and how you're coaching your clients through the process because it's complicated.

SPEAKER_01: 8:29

Yeah. Yeah, I think if you look at um whether it be silos or if you take loyalty, you know, in general, you know, for example, I think um too many retailers still treat loyalty as points for purchase and it's and it's super simplified. They're using old legacy POS loyalty systems that are very, very basic. Um, but the smarter loyalty retailers or ones that are utilizing loyalty, it's all about driving incremental behavior, is what I would call it. Um, if you look at um one of our one of our partners in Giant Eagle, which is a large regional grocer based in Pittsburgh, um, they're combining loyalty with digital promotions. They've delivered hundreds of millions in in incremental sales, um, all while building really strong customer relationships. And the secret is use utilizing that loyalty data to not just reward what's happened in the past behavior, but to shape the next purchase. And moving shoppers into those higher margin categories or creating cross-basket growth is is really important. Um, another example that that I'll give to that really shows the difference, especially when we talk about artificial intelligence and really true one-to-one personalization, is what we've um accomplished with our partnership with Tesco, which launched um what we call AI challenges. And that was done in about May of 2024. And um challenges are think about fully are fully personalized. Um, their AI models take about 190 plus different types of decisions, assign tailored offers and thresholds based upon every single customer behavior and ensuring relevance and driving incremental spend. Um, so that's really the difference is imagine going to a CPG and saying, hey, for every dollar that that you spend, I'm gonna guarantee you incremental spend on that. That's a pretty powerful mechanism, especially even to go get retail media dollars, you know, from a CPG. So that's what really Tesco was was able to accomplish. You know, they have 23 million club card households and 16.3 million app users. So this is a large organization or a large customer base. And what they did was they they piloted fast and scaled fast. And that's something that I like to talk about is what a lot of retailers really should be trying to do to innovate. And you know, they launched at 3 million customers and then scaled to 10 million, you know, almost overnight. Um, and that allowed shoppers to earn up to 50 and you know, pounds in club card points at once, um, unlike an old school traditional um loyalty um incremental promotion. So um having that be fully personalized, utilizing AI to scale, allowed them to scale very fast and not have a ton of um labor that you know was um in order to be inefficient.

SPEAKER_00: 13:45

When you're going to somebody like Giant Eagle or to Tesco and you're saying, hey, listen, we have programs that can bring this kind of incrementality to your world. I'm interested to know what and how you overcome the kind of conceptual hurdles. And I'm I'm going back to some of the the silo discussion we had a minute ago, but yeah, um, I mean, it is almost a universal conversation that I have with so you know what are the challenges? Well, you know, it's data that doesn't want to talk to other data, and it's you know, divisions that don't want to or don't know how to, don't even know other divisions exist. So the the idea of unified commerce, I think, is an absolute brass ring. It's it's a notion that everybody's on board with as an idea, but achieving it can be really difficult. And yet, yeah, what what you're telling me is Eagle Eye has, at least with these couple of clients, figured out a way to stitch this together, and that's probably not the right phrase there, to make this work um in a in a in an enterprise way. So what's the secret sauce? Do you are you showing up with, hey, listen, this is this is the potential outcome. Let's get the ducks in a row to pull this off, or is it more of a kind of uh you know, kind of upstream advisory approach? And I'm sorry if I'm asking the questions are too deep for this.

SPEAKER_01: 15:15

No, it's really um what what we've realized that we need to do in order to make our retail partners successful is to take that consultative approach that you're that you're that you're mentioning, right? Is a lot of retailers are going in, they say we want to do loyalty, we want to do personalization, but we really don't have a clear strategy on how to actually accomplish that. We have the experience of a lot of people here at Eagle Eye and as well as the technology to help them get there. So we we've you know, we've we've like to say, like, you know, we've seen it all and done it all, and then we're thinking about what's next. Um, so that gives us a pretty big advantage. And I think the the AI part of it and the fact that you know, you use the word AI, and every single company, whether they're using it or not, has it on their website. They're talking about how they're using it and personalization. And a lot of times, frankly, it's just it a lot of other it's window dressing. It's window dressing, and it's and and they're they might be doing some segmentation or they might be doing some, you know, for lack of a better term, bucketizing of of customers. Um, I was at a I was at um the grocery next conference uh last week in Chicago, and I was I was kind of shocked to see that the word AI didn't actually even come up on the first half a day, it came up the second part of the day. But the word that was really um out there more was personalization. And every no kidding, every person there was talking about personalization, one-to-one personalization. And I was I was shocked and excited because I'm like, wow, this is what exactly what we do. But the fact is that there was a lot of noise about it, um, because everyone was saying they do some level of personalization. And um the fact that we've been able to have this in market with large retailers who have been able to scale it and prove it out and prove out ROI, I think gives us a really big advantage over those that are like just now starting out and talking about it's moving so fast. And the fact that we have literally years of learnings um to help improve the solution has really helped us kind of take it to that next level. And I think the reason people are talking about personalization so much is because it works, right? Is you know, then the other analogy that I like to use is you know, have people uh shop the way that they consume other things. So think about the way that we watch TV and scroll around on our devices, you know, my Netflix profile is personalized to me and my wife's to hers, and they couldn't be more different, frankly. Um, the algorithm works and it's uh and it's accurate. Um, and also just like how you know, I've got my my three teenage daughters who are on Instagram, and I've got Instagram, but our feeds are very, very different. Um, and the reason that people are on Netflix so much or are scrolling on Instagram so much is because these are all things that are personalized to them that are relevant to them. And frankly, if they weren't, people would get off of it and go do something else because they don't want to look at things that aren't them. It's the same exact thing when you're shopping for your groceries, right? If I I mentioned I have three teenage daughters, I don't plan to have any more kids at this point. So if you put um if you put diapers and things like that on my grocery list, you know, uh you know, I'm gonna look somewhere else and I'm gonna disengage. Um, so that's really the power of what we're able to do with AI and personalization, um, and be that that sticky, sticky, um, and and help people get through, um uh, you know, uh personalize it so that they're engaged and then they're gonna feel loyal to that to that retailer because they know them at that point.

SPEAKER_00: 18:59

Yeah, really interesting moment in time in terms of personalization because now we can do stuff like this that we couldn't even conceive of at this level of granularity, what, two years ago, maybe even a year ago. You know, yeah, it's just crazy. So you've worked with uh some big brands, some big retailers, you've seen underneath the hood of a lot of retail technology. Um it's probably a separate conversation, but I'd love to get your uh you know, your opinions of what's good and what's bad and some of the mistakes and some of the pathways you've seen. Because you know, uh I have a a a view to some of it. You've probably got a deeper view to that. I think that'd be fascinating. But I I'm I'm mentioning that because uh the retail stack, at least kind of the customer-facing stack, is morphing uh really fast right now because of AI. I mean tools that were uh call it even cutting edge two years ago are now kind of table stakes and they're being, you know. I know companies who are considering shelving some giant investments from only two years ago because of what they can now do with AI. So you've seen all this stuff, you're working with a great group of people now that are that are doing some really cutting edge stuff with AI and personalization and loyalty. I want to just ask you, you know, from where you sit, what are say two or three things that you wish on a wish list basis that brands and retailers could see and understand that you do.

SPEAKER_01: 20:50

Yeah, I think, you know, the the great thing about working for an organization that is worldwide is that you get to see um people, different shopping behaviors in different from different cultures and different ways that retailers operate um because you know, culturally we're all different. So you get to see kind of what's working and what's and what's not in in different areas of the world. What I think is the same around the world is customer centricity, if you will. And I think that a lot of retailers are looking at certain KPIs and saying, hey, I need to, I need to get more sales or I, you know, I need to do this. And so therefore I'm gonna build something that's gonna just do that. But I think if the focus is on the customer and making sure that they start with the customer outcome and not necessarily the technology itself, but how can I how can I create a better customer experience to create loyalty? Um, those other things will come. If you create a great customer experience, you will get more visits, you will get an increase in sales, you'll get a bigger share of basket. You know, they're gonna you're gonna be loyal to your to your store. So I think, and the AI and the personalization, all of that can certainly help with that. But I think retailers focusing on that first are gonna be the ones that you know that end up winning. I think if you look at um Walmart's a really interesting example of a retailer that even just not too long ago, as you mentioned, you know not just AI, but like not too many years ago was Walmart was that they have a ton of stores and they were the lowest price. And that was really you know the main thing. Well, they have invested so much money in technology that they have significantly improved the overall customer experience. And frankly, that has helped them bridge the gap to call it the regional grocer who I go to my, you know, I go to my grocery store across the street, I know the produce guy, I know the butcher, I know the people that are checking me out. And that was kind of the draw to that, um, to that retailer why I kept going back. And and Walmart is trying is is now doing some things that are um are are bridging the gap between that. And I think um now these regional grocers, these other types of retailers have their AI is giving them the ability to have technology to continue to improve their overall customer experience and still have that personalized um approach in the store with the butcher and the pharmacist and the people that know your name type of thing. So um they have to be able to use that in order to um get competitive again.

SPEAKER_00: 23:28

So it's a fast moving world. What do you think you and I are gonna be talking about in two years, which is impossible? I mean, two years is like a legacy. So forget that. That's a bad question. Let me re redo that one. What do you think we're gonna be talking about in a year?

SPEAKER_01: 23:45

I think data is still gonna be. I mean, we're talking about it now, right? I think, but as you talk to retailers now, it's man, I have data all over here. I acquired this company, their data is completely mismatched to the data that I currently have, and it's a mess. And so I think the the the cleansing of the data and really thinking of your data as a strategic asset, not exhaust, is really where retailers need to think about now, but also, you know, how do we how do how do in a year or two we've solved that problem? And if you have, it just really opens up the doors and the possibilities of what you're gonna be able to do to get to that customer centricity that I mentioned a minute ago and create that customer experience because your data is in line, your silos have been broken down, you now have this, you know, unified commerce experience for your customers. Um, and the data is really at the heart of that um that portion of it. So I think certainly AI is gonna be at the top of the conversation, and but I think the way to get there, you know, the AI is running off of your data. So um that's gonna probably be the key point I think that people are gonna have to get around.

SPEAKER_00: 24:59

Yeah, I completely agree. And that that's a we've said it before, universal concern. And I think, you know, in a year, it'll still be a problem. Yeah, it'll probably still be a problem with a lot of people in two years because these things can be unwieldy. But um, but yeah, I think we'll always be talking about that on some level. Absolutely. Well, Jeff, I really appreciate this. It's uh, as I've said uh many times when I get on the on a call with uh with Eagle Eye, there's so many different places to take these conversations. You know, what is what is loyalty look like? What is loyalty, what's working in loyalty and why, and what isn't and why, and what's behind the friction and all that things I know that you think about and talk about all the time. I'm dying to get in with you, into it with you, but uh we'll probably need to leave that for another conversation, otherwise we blow the afternoon. Definitely. Well, we'll have to have a part two for sure. I love that. I love it. So again, I'm I'm talking to Jeff Baskin, who's chief revenue officer at Eagle Eye. It's a really interesting company doing some really interesting things in loyalty, personalization, and engagement. And um, check out the links below this podcast.