Artificial Intelligence and Order Orchestration: Together an Unbeatable Team
Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just another trend; it’s a transformative technology with near-universal appeal due to its extensive impact. In fact, 92 percent of businesses planned to invest in AI-powered software last year. Additionally, the number of AI products released in 2023 doubled that of prior years, according to Gartner. Retailers are no different in their eagerness for AI.
Order Management Challenges Disrupt Retail Performance
Retailers are reporting demand and fulfillment challenges, including financial strain due to excess stock, inefficiencies caused by inaccurate tracking, and stockouts from inaccurate or missing product information. These issues lead to missed sales and operational disruptions, directly impacting revenue and profits. Moreover, these issues create bigger challenges for retailers, such as:
- Customer dissatisfaction: Delays, stockouts, and inadequate or inaccurate product information frustrate consumers, resulting in lost sales and weakened brand loyalty.
- Operational inefficiency: Inaccurate tracking and manual errors lead to stockouts or overstock, disrupting business operations and increasing costs.
- Commerce channel challenges: Poor search engine optimization, site search performance, and shopping feed data impede product discovery, lower conversation rates, and increase order returns.
While retailers have historically struggled with disconnected systems for order management and product information, a new approach has emerged via AI-powered order orchestration that brings these capabilities together in a unified, highly effective solution. And at its heart is an intelligent AI assistant that works alongside retail IT teams to enhance operations across:
- real-time inventory optimization;
- product information enrichment and distribution;
- order management and fulfillment; and
- channel management and expansion.
Instead of spending months setting up new social commerce integrations, retailers can now deploy in days while maintaining consistent product content across all platforms. This rapid deployment is powered by intelligent workflows that allow small teams to efficiently manage complex operations like optimizing product content, allocating inventory, optimizing fulfillment, and more.
By dynamically optimizing fulfillment capacity based on real-time data, retailers can efficiently allocate resources to meet fluctuating demand without overextending their operations. Combined with easier order tracking and consistent and accurate product information across all touchpoints, customers get a seamless shopping experience that keeps them coming back. The result is a virtuous cycle where operational excellence directly translates into customer loyalty.
Order orchestration delivers an AI-powered solution that scales seamlessly across omnichannel operations. It allows for easier and more effective discovery of products optimized for search engines, helping to drive conversion together with real-time monitoring, smart exception alerts, and dynamic capacity optimization to ensure efficient, flexible fulfillment. Benefits include:
- Enhanced demand generation: Retailers can improve omnichannel shopping experiences with AI-enriched product information connected to real-time inventory to enhance product discovery, SEO and site search, helping to boost conversion. Moreover, automated categorization mapping assigns newly imported or created products to the appropriate category.
- Intelligent fulfillment optimization: With smart order fulfillment, retailers can automatically evaluate inventory levels, carrier capacity, and delivery promises across locations to eliminate manual tradeoffs between speed and cost. With analytics-driven insights, AI recommends new fulfillment rules and automates decisions, helping retailers meet service levels while reducing shipping costs and split shipments. This approach ensures that orders are fulfilled from the most optimal location, streamlining operations and enhancing the customer experience.
- Seamless channel management: Retailers can capture revenue faster by launching and iterating channels in days vs. months to increase conversion through consistent and rich product content. Small teams can scale efficiently using intelligent workflows, minimize poor customer experiences from overselling and cancellations with real-time inventory, and reduce product detail page (PDP) abandonment with real-time availability and product content.
- DTC excellence: Reducing reliance on marketplaces and third parties increases margins. AI-powered OMS helps retailers quickly test and scale new markets, and then increase customer lifetime value with better shopping experiences from rich product descriptions and intelligent inventory allocations. Retailers can also enable reliable and faster fulfillment and free up working capital with optimized inventory availability.
The adoption of AI in retail is accelerating as more use cases emerge and the potential value becomes clear. With a reimagined order orchestration, retailers can harness AI’s power through an integrated solution that combines intelligent order management with rich product content capabilities.
Mustafa Masud is the director of product management for fabric, the creator of the next-generation order orchestration solution.
Mustafa Masud is the director of product management for fabric, the creator of the next-generation order orchestration solution. Previously Mustafa served as the digital product manager for Bed Bath & Beyond.
