Last year, Levi Strauss & Co. shared a significant milestone in our journey to become a data-driven business, moving from a fragmented, multi-source data environment to a unified, cloud-based analytics platform built on Google Cloud.
Today, we are announcing the next chapter of that journey: the introduction of conversational analytics, a capability that allows employees to query our data in their common language and receive secure, accurate and immediate answers. This represents a fundamental shift in how our people interact with data and, ultimately, in how we make decisions as a business.
Building Upon a Solid Foundation
We launched our internal data and analytics platform in fall 2024 as part of our work to become a more data-driven, consumer-centric organization, and adoption was quick. Today, more than 2,200 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 truth.
This foundational infrastructure has been making a real impact. For example, our Merchandising Planning and Inventory Management (MPIM) organization was an early adopter of the platform, testing and helping refine our data and analytic capabilities. Before our single 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. Today, the team operates more efficiently with streamlined data, faster insights and the ability to proactively support business decisions.
But access to data is only part of the equation — the real opportunity lies in making that data instantly actionable for every employee, not just those with deep analytical expertise.
Conversational analytics makes that shift possible.
Putting Our Foundational Infrastructure to Work
Built on Google Cloud’s Looker platform and powered by Gemini, our conversational analytics capability allows employees to ask business questions the same way they would ask a colleague, receiving answers in seconds drawn directly from our verified, high-quality data platform. The system understands our unique internal terminology, business context and data definition. This sets our employees up for success, no matter the context — a merchandising executive can access sell-out performance for owned-and-operated stores across a certain week, a planner can query inventory levels by product category using the same internal shorthand they use every day. The list goes on.
“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, Merchandising Planning and Inventory Management at LS&Co. “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.”
“We’re turning data into insight at scale,” added 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.”
With a trusted platform, a growing community of users and capabilities that put the right answers in the hands of the right people at the right moment, we are building the foundation for the next chapter of growth at LS&Co. — and we’re just getting started.
