Groceries Inc. is a leading retail grocery chain in Canada that offers a wide range of best-quality products and services at a competitive price to its customers. There are 1200 company-owned stores Canada-wide, 500 franchise stores, and 40 distribution centers in all provinces of Canada. Groceries Inc. employs 80,000 full-time and 10,000 part-time employees in Canada. On average, it lists 75,000 items in the store and 4500 vendors who supply them. Groceries Inc. also has its brand manufactured and provided to Groceries Inc. by 3^rd party food processing vendors.

Groceries inc. is a publicly listed company on the Toronto stock exchange. Its current share price is 85 CAD. Financial details are as follows:

Revenue	30,000 Mil	Gross Profit	9,000 Mil
Cost of Revenue	18,000 Mil	Net Income	1,200 Mil
Sales Growth	10 %	Net Income Growth	2.5 %

Groceries Inc. is the market leader holding a 25% market share. Its nearest competitor has a 23% market share. Groceries inc. faces tough competition from brick & mortar stores as well as online retailers. Groceries Inc. is known for its best customer service at an 80% customer satisfaction rating.

Groceries Inc. has commenced its Digital Transformation journey. Its vision, policies, and strategies incorporate Digital Transformation.

Groceries Inc.'s IT team has 750 employees. The IT team is responsible for ALL aspects of IT, including application, infrastructure, integration, security maintenance and monitoring. IT team is also responsible for application development and enhancements. Currently, the IT team has six months of work backlog and cannot retain talent due to a high workload, mundane tasks, and lack of career growth.

Groceries Inc. uses 35 different applications hosted in 2 data centers in Canada. Both data centers are 90% occupied and have no space to add additional infrastructure.

Groceries Inc. IT Technologies are coming to the end of support, and there is no plan to upgrade or replace. Current technologies are unable to meet business and market needs. As a result, many business units in the organization have started their work around solutions by having many offline excel spreadsheets. In short, the IT Team and Technologies are becoming the bottleneck for business growth.

Executive management expects Digital Transformation to solve Business and IT issues.

AI Application:

Recently, Groceries Inc. received a fine from local authorities for a capacity limit violation. Also, during a local authority inspection, it was discovered that some customers were not wearing masks. Groceries Inc. accepted the findings and committed to improving compliance.

IT team is proposing an AI application. AI application will leverage video feeds coming from entry and exit point surveillance cameras. AI application will use a facial recognition algorithm to detect human entries and exits in the store. Thus, it can keep a count of how many soles are in the store. It will also detect mask-wearing using a facial recognition algorithm. In case of the number of soles in the store crosses the limit or a customer enters without a mask, it will send API to store systems to block the entry.

IT team is very confident that it can develop and deploy this application in 4 weeks. The estimated cost is 250,000 CAD. This includes deployment to ALL stores.

Store operations would like to hire one person to keep track of entry and exit as well as mask requirements. Per hour per person, the cost is 20 CAD.

IT, legal, and corporate prefer AI applications. Store operations are convinced that hiring just one extra person will solve the issue. The finance team is only interested in dollar numbers and won't approve the project until they have the total ROI.

Working as a Lead Business Analyst, Digital Transformation Steering Committee has asked you to perform the following analysis and report back to the steering committee in two weeks.

Steering Committee consists of senior leadership (VP and above) from IT and business.

Steering Committee asks:

• Define the problem statement
• Identify stakeholders for the AI project
• List the critical decisions points