What is Zoined?

Analytics for retail and restaurants. A self-service Business Intelligence product.

What problem does Zoined solve?

Providing fast, easy access to relevant information across the entire organization. Zoined’s UI makes dashboards and reports effortless to use.

Even those with zero technical skills can easily ask questions and generate reports—without struggling with complex BI tools like Power BI.

Zoined integrates with 50+ data sources—something rare in the SMB market, where Excel spreadsheets still dominate. 

Reports from POS systems are often slow and rigid. With Zoined, you can find any information instantly and restructure reports on the fly. Power BI and Point of Sale system reports often require endless clicking and configuration to see the KPI what you need, and it can also take a lot of time.

What is AI bringing to the table?

Zoined’s AI analyst automatically discovers the root causes of KPI changes. 

AI’s advantage? It can run 100 queries simultaneously, while a human analyst can only handle one at a time. AI delivers insights in seconds—what would take a human hours or days.

Here’s an example: You want to analyze why a certain channel/area/site sales have declined. AI instantly provides answers.

From a SaaS CEO’s perspective, what’s been the most challenging aspect of implementing AI?

AI architecture is often unfamiliar territory. The in-house tech team is stretched thin, dealing with technical debt, product development, and issues coming from customer support. 

In SaaS, there’s rarely room to dedicate resources to learning new technologies alongside day-to-day work.

Mastering new technologies like AI requires learning through trial and error. That is why AI adoption speeds up when you have a partner who has successfully executed multiple implementations. Experience matters if you want to kickstart your AI efforts. 

Did you consider recruiting an applied AI engineer? 

I didn’t see it as a realistic option. Finding an experienced applied AI engineer isn’t easy. Plus, hiring is always a risk—firing a partner is far easier than letting go of a key hire.

What are some of the mistakes you’ve made with AI?

Well, after six weeks of code refactoring, you could say starting with out-of-the-box frameworks was a mistake.

But at the same time, they sped up our experimentation. It’s a double-edged sword—you can validate a concept quickly, but then we ended up ripping out tools like LangChain and chatbot integrations (bursts into laughter).

How does Zoined resolve text to SQL problem?

We go around the problem. When a user asks a question about data, AI doesn’t attempt to generate a complex SQL query.

Instead, AI sends the request through our API to our backend, where pre-defined metadata and KPI definitions tailored to the industry exist. The backend then constructs the correct SQL query, retrieves the data, and returns the precise KPI to the end user—all seamlessly.

This is possible because Zoined is a vertical-specific service with deep domain expertise.

Snowflake takes a different approach, attempting to have AI generate SQL queries directly to fetch data. The fundamental issue with Snowflake is that it is a generic, vertical-agnostic service.

AI struggles to create precise queries, especially given the complexity and variability of real-world datasets. The result is unreliable outputs that require manual corrections—defeating the purpose of automation.

Zoined’s advantage is that it is a vertical-specific solution that always handles structured, industry-specific data using optimized, industry-specific SQL queries.

What’s been the most inspiring aspect of AI after you made the decision to invest in it? 

The magic of typing a question and getting a visual report in seconds. It’s a true wow factor.

Does AI enable new revenue streams?

We haven’t made final decisions yet—we’re focused on validating the top use cases that provide the most value for our customers.

AI positions us to attract larger customers. and move towards supporting even more operational data query use cases via voice interface

Right now, our product is often seen as a traditional self-service BI tool. You can onboard in less than 24 hours, compared to a Power BI project that can take months. AI allows us to expand in ways our competitors simply can’t match.

About Zoined

Zoined has customers in 30+ countries, including well-known brands like Gant, Pizza Hut, Johnnie Walker, Kanebo, and The Body Shop.

If you could pick one thing people would know about Zoined, what would it be?

Act on facts! That’s our slogan.