Grid spot pricing, Corporate hours management. Complaints from a store about the need to defrost a specific unit.

All the stores hit a "cloud" server the manufacturer manages, letting a single corporate location call the shots on consumption. I also find it likely they can call up individual VFD's and run diagnostics.

Yes, since the dawn of refrigeration, we've gotten along fine without it, but I wouldn't say it's useless to have bidirectional communication because some idiot installers in cooperation with the idiot supermarket IT let the controller have a public IP or because the vendor didn't think to lock remote manual defrost to a sane time limit.