HawkEyes Digital wins prestigious global technology award

Staff Reporter:
Dhaka-based technology firm HawkEyes Digital Monitoring Ltd has been named Best AI-Powered Retail Analytics & Merchandising Automation Company 2025 at the Technology Innovator Awards organised by Corporate Vision magazine.

According to a press release, the awards are published by UK-based AI Global Media and recognise cutting-edge technological innovations from around the world.Corporate Vision, a monthly digital publication under AI Global Media Ltd, has been highlighting corporate progress across sectors such as technology, human resources and marketing since its establishment in 2010. Its awards programmes celebrate companies that demonstrate innovation, excellence and measurable impact across diverse markets. The recognition comes at a time when fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands are facing heavy losses due to weak retail execution. Although companies often spend 20–24 percent of their revenue on trade promotions for shelf space and in-store displays, visibility and product availability frequently remain inadequate.

In Bangladesh, the challenge is particularly acute, as more than 98 percent of the country’s 2.2 million retail outlets are unstructured neighbourhood grocery stores with little or no digital infrastructure. Once products reach these stores, brands often lose visibility.
Traditional manual audits conducted by field representatives are time-consuming, prone to errors and only 30–60 percent accurate, causing nearly half of promotional investments to generate losses.
HawkEyes’ flagship solution, M-Lens, directly addresses these issues. Powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence, the end-to-end merchandising automation platform allows field representatives to simply photograph retail shelves. The system then analyses the images within seconds to identify products, count inventory, detect gaps and flag merchandising problems.

Users report productivity gains of up to 70 percent for field teams by eliminating manual data entry, along with 15–30 percent increases in sales or equivalent cost savings in marketing and operations. What distinguishes HawkEyes is its focus on complex, real-world retail environments. Unlike many Western-centric retail technologies, M-Lens is built to function in crowded shops, mixed Bengali-English signage, poor connectivity and challenging conditions such as monsoon disruptions. Trained on one of the industry’s largest FMCG SKU datasets, the platform now monitors more than 1.5 million outlets—the largest such network in Bangladesh—across both modern trade and general trade stores.

The platform also integrates outdoor advertising tracking, enabling managers to monitor billboards and in-store stock through a single application. Adopted by leading local and multinational FMCG companies, M-Lens has demonstrated enterprise-level reliability.
HawkEyes CEO Mirza Ferdous Ohid said even a 1 percent improvement in shelf availability can boost sales by 2–3 percent, adding that the solution has become essential for brands seeking to remain competitive. The award highlights the growing contribution of emerging markets like Bangladesh to global technological innovation, demonstrating that world-class solutions can be developed locally to address challenges worldwide.