Prashant Agrawal, the CEO of Impact Analytics, thinks that retail is both an art and a science. He’s happy that everyone is finally interested in AI. Impact Analytics has been working on AI for almost ten years, and Agrawal believes that retail will benefit the most from it. Why? Well, retail has a lot of tech debt, and it’s also the toughest business out there. COVID-19 has changed everything, and there is no new normal. The pandemic, supply chain issues, inflation, and wars have made things even more complicated.
Agrawal compares retail to changing weather patterns. Just like the weather, retail needs to make adjustments. For example, there will be a dramatic change in sizes over the next few years due to weight loss drugs like Ozempic. To make better predictions, Impact Analytics suggests combining humans with AI and machine learning. There is a lot of data available, and their company helps make sense of it.
One company that has benefited from working with Impact Analytics is Coach. Leigh Manheim, the Senior VP of North America omnichannel at Coach, is excited about the changes happening in the industry. She always has to think about keeping up with the customers and what opportunities lie ahead.
As Coach grows, they need to think differently about inventory and how to get it to the customers efficiently. They have used AI to determine allocation and have even worked with the Harvard innovation lab to test AI against traditional methods. AI came out on top.
Coach also uses AI to make inventory decisions and determine which distribution nodes to send inventory to. Embracing AI has allowed the team to focus more on strategic thinking and sales-driving activities. It has taken away the tedious work of analyzing data.
Despite fears of AI taking over human jobs, Manheim sees it as a shift in focus. Instead of doing repetitive tasks, humans can now focus on more engaging and strategic work, like clustering stores based on consumer preferences.
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