BEFORE ACCORDION
Starbucks
Conexiom
goMoxie
Cox Media Group
Proof Advertising
The BVA Group
Gemma Merchant is a Vice President with over a decade of experience building production machine learning systems, with deep expertise in demand forecasting, capacity planning, and translating quantitative analysis into operational decisions.
Before Accordion, Gemma was the technical lead for demand forecasting at Starbucks Coffee Company, where she owned the forecast driving labor allocation across more than 10,000 North American stores. She replaced a third-party vendor system with an in-house solution, led the team from ad-hoc analysis to shipping production models, and built the monitoring infrastructure that kept those models reliable at fleet scale. In this role she briefed at the executive level and partnered closely with Finance and Operations leadership on resource decisions affecting hundreds of millions in annual staffing investment.
Prior to Starbucks, Gemma built data science capabilities where none existed. At Cox Media Group she established the data science function at a 120-year-old media company, developing predictive analytics that informed content strategy and advertising decisions. At goMoxie she grew the data science team from the ground up, building NLP systems that turned customer conversation data into a revenue-generating service. She has also worked on document intelligence and entity recognition at Conexiom. Before moving into data science, Gemma worked in financial modeling and business valuation.
Gemma’s expertise spans time-series forecasting, capacity and resource planning, production ML deployment, and model monitoring at scale, alongside earlier work in natural language processing and document intelligence. She has worked across retail and food service, media and advertising, technology, and financial services, in roles ranging from individual contributor to technical lead, and has built and grown data science functions at multiple organizations.
Gemma holds an M.S. in Business Analytics and a B.B.A. in Business Honors and Finance, both from The University of Texas at Austin.