How AI is Transforming Retail Jobs, Not Replacing Them

Artificial intelligence is more than a buzzword in retail; it's a game changer. AI-powered technologies are helping retailers enhance operational efficiency and improve everything from inventory management to marketing to customer service to driving sales and margin.

However, AI’s ability to work faster and more efficiently than humanly possible has led to the persistent myth that AI is killing jobs. While AI is undoubtedly taking over many mundane tasks previously done by humans, it’s not making humans obsolete. With AI handling repetitive and manual activities, employees can do their jobs better and faster, enjoy more engaging work, and create greater business value.

Financial and inventory planning are key areas in retail where we’re seeing AI enhance jobs, rather than replace them. AI-driven planning and inventory optimization solutions are freeing up planning teams to focus on high-value strategies for maximizing profits and satisfying customers.

Boosting Productivity for Planning Teams

Planners play a crucial role in retail. They’re responsible for making millions of decisions about thousands of SKUs and store locations combinations — all aiming to position the right inventory in the right place at the right time to maximize profits and ensure customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, planning teams are often held back by outdated and highly manual systems for financial planning and inventory management.

Typically, planners spend countless hours trying to make sense of mountains of data, including changing forecasts, customer data, historical sales, returns, and more. All that information is stored in different systems and formats. Planners have to constantly jump between systems, dump data into spreadsheets, come up with and input targets, adjust different parameters, then do it all over again. The work is tedious and stressful, and at the end of the day inventory decisions are still heavily based on guesswork and may not deliver results.

Now, AI can remove the burden of day-to-day data analysis from human planners. Beyond generating highly accurate demand forecasts, AI can automate and optimize the actual decision-making process. AI-decisioning platforms analyze massive amounts of data and run millions of scenarios to determine where each piece of inventory will have the highest probability of selling for the highest possible profit. AI can generate and execute profit-optimizing decisions about everything from allocation and replenishment, to transfers and returns positioning, to pricing and markdowns.

What does this mean for human planners? By moving to an AI-decisioning platform, planning teams can realize an 80 percent time savings. Planners have more time and energy to devote to problem-solving and uncovering new opportunities to optimize inventory management.

Here are just a few examples of what planners can take on when they're free from repetitive and manual tasks:

• Analyzing lost sales and stock-outs based on margin contribution.
• Evaluating constraints in sales and margins to determine the value of relaxing them.
• Analyzing vendor leads times and product flow.
• Evaluating the inventory investment in visual minimums.
• Focusing on the art of assortment and new products.

Overall, planning teams are elevated to a more valuable, strategic level within their organization, making their jobs more engaging and satisfying.

Adopting AI: A Simple Step for Retail Success

The retail world is always changing, from the rise of e-commerce to sudden shifts in consumer behavior to the emergence of transformative technologies. Retailers that are slow to embrace AI risk falling behind to more agile competitors that are leveraging the technology to drive better business performance, deliver great customer experiences, and create engaging roles for their employees.

Fortunately, introducing AI has never been more accessible or user-friendly. The right AI solution can handle all the complexity of omnichannel retail, while offering quick and simple integration with existing systems. And by partnering with an experienced vendor, retailers can deploy AI-built solutions that align with their unique needs and goals without needing an in-house team of data scientists.

In summary, AI is transforming the nature of inventory jobs for the better in retail. With the right provider and solution, retailers and their planning teams can achieve a more productive, profitable and competitive future.

Tav Tepfer is the chief revenue officer at Invent Analytics, a global retail planning solutions provider.