A joined-up supplier portal for Waitrose—with AI guidance at every step

Preparing a large supplier cohort for a major food and drink festival creates a dense operational journey. Suppliers need to reserve the right space, understand which products are suitable for each location, apply for additional opportunities, complete mandatory tasks, submit compliance information, manage team accreditation, arrange logistics and keep pace with changing deadlines. The event team needs to review the same work, resolve exceptions and maintain a clear picture of readiness.

Putting forms online would not solve the whole problem. Suppliers still arrive with practical questions in their own language: what should I do next, which spaces fit my product, what is outstanding, where do I upload a document, or has an application been approved? The answer may live in guidance, in a live record or in a workflow with important safeguards. Waitrose needed one operational system—and help that understood the system around each supplier.

We designed the portal as the source of truth for the supplier journey, not simply a collection of forms. Suppliers receive a personalised dashboard with grouped tasks, deadlines and direct routes into the relevant reservation or submission. Space booking, an interactive map, additional opportunities, extras, team management, compliance, file submissions, logistics, key dates, guides and conversations all work within the same authenticated environment. Waitrose staff use corresponding administrative views to review applications and compliance, manage spaces and content, and follow progress across the programme.

The AI concierge was designed as a supporting layer over that product. When a supplier opens chat, the portal securely identifies their user, role and supplier organisation and passes the current page as session context. The assistant can therefore answer in relation to where the supplier is and who they represent, while still directing actions back into the controlled portal workflow.

Voxd built both sides of the experience: the role-based supplier-management platform and the embedded AI assistant. The portal coordinates reservations, tasks, applications, supporting files, compliance reviews, logistics and event-team communication in one structured system, with clear status boundaries between supplier submission and Waitrose approval.

The assistant adds four connected capabilities. It searches the maintained festival knowledge base for operational guidance; reads the logged-in supplier's live task list; retrieves the current product types and their allowed locations; and searches live spaces by product, location, availability, floor, budget, cooking and outdoor requirements. Guardrails stop it guessing deadlines, approvals, invoice details or file specifications. It encourages self-service when the action exists in the portal and escalates to the event team only when information or judgement genuinely sits outside the system.

Suppliers now have one place to understand and complete the work required for the festival, while the Waitrose team has a corresponding operational view for managing submissions, reviews and exceptions. The dashboard turns a complicated preparation process into visible next actions, and the portal preserves the distinction between applying, submitting and receiving formal approval.

AI makes that structured system easier to use. Instead of behaving like a generic FAQ bot, the concierge can combine trusted documentation with the supplier's identity, current location in the portal and live operational records. It can explain a process, surface outstanding work or narrow down appropriate spaces, then guide the supplier to the exact place where the action should be completed. The result is a digital service in which software provides control and AI provides context.