Digital transformation in retail: AI, data, and cloud in practice

The Brazilian supermarket sector is widely recognized for its operational complexity, extremely tight operating margins, and a historical resistance to major technological disruptions. For decades, the physical shopping experience remained almost unchanged, while internal management relied on rigid legacy systems, decentralized spreadsheets, and reports with inconsistent data. However, the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud-based data integration architecture, and changes in consumer behavior demands an immediate strategic overhaul.

In this challenging scenario, technology is no longer seen as a passive cost center but assumes the role of primary driver of profitability, efficiency, and customer experience. To analyze in depth how digital transformation is being implemented in practice, we have included the valuable insights shared by Thiago Santana, CIO of Lopes Supermarkets.

1. The historical bottleneck in retail and the new role of the CIO Strategist

Historically, the expansion and maintenance of supermarket operations have been hampered by technological fragmentation. It is common to find organizations operating with archaic ERPs, applications with obsolete algorithms, and information silos where the board of directors, store management, and the supply team see completely divergent numbers for the same financial indicator.

Thiago Santana points out that the biggest initial challenge when taking over the IT leadership at Lopes Supermarkets was precisely breaking with cultural inertia and revamping the archaic technological infrastructure:

This paradigm shift is reshaping the role of the technology executive. The modernizing CIO doesn't focus on merely maintaining infrastructure, but rather on solving business pain points. In the food sector, where inventory loss and margin mismatches can compromise financial survival, having an updated Income Statement (IS) in real time is a decisive competitive advantage.

Accelerate Lopes: indicators in the palm of your hand

Through the Acelera Lopes, the chain eliminated the manual sending of consolidated spreadsheets. The store manager now monitors sales productivity, loss reduction targets, and operating costs in real time directly on a modern mobile application, enabling agile decision-making and immediate corrective action.

2. Operational agility with Generative AI in internal development

One of the biggest barriers faced by traditional IT teams is the time-to-marketfor new enterprise applications. Legacy development processes used to require months of specification and coding. With the introduction of generative artificial intelligence assistants integrated into the development environment (such as the Cursor), this reality has changed dramatically.

Santana revealed that by equipping a lean team of developers with AI tools, productivity increased by 60% to 70%, allowing the creation of more than 30 proprietary internal applications in record time

This ability to respond quickly allowed Lopes to automate even the monitoring of bottlenecks in the traditional ERP (SAP), notifying teams and triggering automatic calls via agents integrated with WhatsApp.

3. Data reliability: integrating iPaaS, lakehouse, and artificial intelligence

Developing agile applications is pointless if the underlying data is incorrect or inconsistent. In retail, discrepancies between ERP inventory, Business Intelligence (BI) reports, and point-of-sale (POS) data lead to severe losses due to stockouts or excess inventory.

To solve data fragmentation and avoid the complexity and exorbitant costs of hiring multiple isolated vendors for Data Lake, iPaaS, and AI pipelines, Lopes Supermercados adopted the Skyone Studio.

Data Governance Architecture in Skyone Studio

The unified architecture provided by Skyone structures the entire corporate data lifecycle through seamlessly integrated layers:

• Integration Layer (iPaaS): natively connects ERPs, CRMs, and POS systems with over 400 pre-built connectors, eliminating manual point-to-point integrations.
• Storage Layer (Lakehouse): Transfers raw data to the Data Lake and processes it for the Data Warehouse/Lakehouse, ensuring that the data is processed, cleaned, and ready for querying.
• Intelligence Layer & AI Agents: enables autonomous agents to process structured and unstructured data, converting natural language into bank queries (Text-to-SQL) and orchestrating enterprise automations.
• Multichannel Consumption Layer: makes data available identically in BI dashboards (Power BI, Metabase) or directly via conversational interfaces on WhatsApp and Google Chat.

4. Cloud infrastructure: the "Two Es" rule (Stability and Scalability)

Migrating critical systems to the cloud often becomes a financial and operational nightmare for CIOs when done without the right partner. Generic international providers often charge in dollars with unpredictable fluctuations and architectures that require complex refactoring.

During the interview, Thiago pointed out that Lopes suffered from instability and bottlenecks with large cloud providers before migrating its critical systems to Skyone's managed infrastructure (Skyone Autosky):

Through Skyone Autosky , monolithic applications and client-server systems are migrated to the public cloud without the need to rewrite a single line of code ( No-Code Migration ). The platform uses continuous auto-scaling algorithms that adjust processing resources (vCPU and memory) minute by minute based on real demand, ensuring high performance during sales peaks without financial waste and with fully predictable revenue in local currency.

Read also: ERP migration without rewriting code: how it works

5. Cutting-edge innovation: immersive experience and high-volume self-checkout

The digital transformation of Lopes Supermarkets was not limited to the back office and cloud servers; it directly revolutionized the end consumer's experience in the physical store (shopper).

Proprietary self-checkout without limitations

While most retail chains adopt standardized self-checkout models limited to small purchases (up to 10 or 15 items), Lopes developed its own self-service solution in a record time of 30 days. Integrating high-precision industrial scales with support for up to 50kg and monitoring via computer vision and loss prevention, the system accepts flows of 20 to 30 items, drastically reducing queues.

Super app and immersive experience marketing

Looking ahead to the next 5 years, Santana revealed that the chain is launching a Super App designed based on global studies of the biggest retail players (such as Shopee and Shein). The goal is to transform the neighborhood supermarket into a hub for daily and personalized connections

• Dynamic Surprise Offers: By scanning a product's digital label on the shelf with the app, the customer receives an exclusive offer in real time, generated by the integrated CRM.
• Scarcity Triggers and Gamification: Personalized promotions with limited duration (e.g., 10 minutes) encourage consistent physical visits.
• Hyper-personalization of the shopper: The AI ​​engine analyzes shopping history and habits to suggest the exact products the moment the consumer passes near the store.

6. Economic overview and the new dynamics of retail shopping

A key analytical aspect discussed during the podcast concerns the effectiveness of major seasonal events, such as Black Friday, in the food retail sector. Given the current economic climate, both manufacturers and supermarkets are changing their margin and inventory strategies.

As Santana pointed out, the secret to success in today's retail market lies not in sporadic mega-promotions that squeeze margins to the point of loss, but rather in precise purchasing: "The secret is to buy well and know what to buy for non-seasonal periods."

And for that, we've prepared a quick Black Friday preparedness survey, designed for retailers and technology teams who want to move beyond guesswork and clearly see the concrete risks before the date arrives.

Conclusion

The successful digital transformation of Lopes Supermarkets proves that technology is not the barrier to scale; the determining factor is organizational culture and leadership willing to question the status quo. As Thiago Santana summarized, citing the pillars he brought from his executive experience: "Companies need people with a passion for achievement, who are pragmatic and disruptive."

With a combination of results-oriented management, AI-powered development agility, and the robustness of Skyone (integrating Autosky, Studio, and Cybersecurity), Lopes has established itself as the leading reference for innovation in neighborhood retail.

Do you want to delve even deeper into this transformative conversation?

Listen to the full episode of the Trend Off featuring Thiago Santana (CIO of Lopes Supermarkets) directly on Spotify and discover all the behind-the-scenes details of this technological revolution!

Written by Skyone