AI as a Calm Retail Assistant: Smarter Stock, Pricing, and Decisions

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What if your favorite shop knew exactly what you wanted before you even

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did yourself? Not in a creepy way, but in a helpful way.

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I'm Claire Bailey, the retail champion, and this is retail Reckoning.

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Today, we're talking about AI. Not the scary

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sort of Silicon Valley robots taking over the world type of AI,

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but practical, everyday AI and how it can quietly help

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retailers get better at the basics.

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Retail reckoning. No space for

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dusty shelves.

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Imagine one day you log into your stock system and instead

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of having to dig around reports and export to Excel and

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analyze it endlessly, it simply reveals to you. For

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example, these five lines are your problem, they're not selling through.

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These three are your opportunity, make sure you don't go out of stock, that kind

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of thing. But I do get it that a lot of businesses, and particularly smaller

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businesses, can feel a bit overwhelmed by technology in

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general and how much has changed in recent years. So I can understand

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that the phrase artificial intelligence might make you feel a bit

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uneasy, but I'd say that's far from an

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uncommon thing. To be fair, I felt that way until

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I began to realize how to drive it. I didn't want it

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to sort of take over the business or steal all my secrets. And I can

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understand why retailers don't want to lose control or scare the

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team or make people feel that they're not valued anymore.

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But really, more than anything, it's about not knowing where to start.

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So I'm going to try to demystify this with no jargon.

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And I'm also going to say, if you enjoy this episode, my

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colleague Steph recently wrote a really good blog about

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use of AI in business and in retail. It's a long one, so

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it's got loads of hints and tips and advice in there. And if you want

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to have a read of it, go to retailchampion.co.uk

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blog so we're gonna look at how retail can get support

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from AI, free uptime and help make better

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decisions without taking away any of your human personal

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creativity, which is really at the heart of everything you do and why

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your customers keep coming back. Let's start

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with the honesty of retail reality. Right now, we all know

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that margins are under pressure, costs are rising, customers

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are cautious and independent. Retailers in particular, because

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of the rising cost of staffing, are trying to do more on

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themselves rather than having staff in because they've had to weigh

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up. Can I afford to give somebody the extra shift or would I be

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better off doing it myself? So if you're trying to do buying

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merchandising staff scheduling, training, marketing,

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finance, problem solving and customer care.

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That's kind of too much. And I think the thing is

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none of us are short of great ideas. It's things like having the time

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and the headspace and I think that's where I can earn its

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place. Because it's never going to be a replacement for for your judgment

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and your business because that's what makes you unique. But it is

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something that can give you fast access to your data.

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And I kind of think of it as like having a calm

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assistant who keeps track of the data all day long and just

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taps you on the shoulder to let you know something needs to be looked at.

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Something matters. In fact, in the blog my colleague

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referred to AI as an untrained page.

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And so you still need to have human intelligence to direct

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it, but then it can take some of the heavy lifting off you.

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So what's that got to do with back to basics retailing?

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It's never going to fix bad retail, that's

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absolutely the case. But it can amplify good retail.

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So you know if your range appears over complicated and you've got

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product cannibalization slow move as an obsolescence,

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AI can help you quickly identify where the range is costing you

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money. And if your pricing or your promotions don't

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seem to be sticking, promotions are not performing or

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pricing just doesn't seem to make sense in terms of value for money

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and price laddering. It helps highlight the gaps if stock

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goes out of balance. So you're out of stock on all the wrong things

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and overstocked on some things, it can flag it early.

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And it's about setting up alerts and warning systems where

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as an overlay to whatever business data you've already got,

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it just does what I've called in the past in a previous life

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in a software company, exception reporting. But you have to tell it

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what the exceptions are. You want to know. And then away it goes and

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digs through the data. And it's not really about gimmicks

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or funky tech, it's about doing the basics

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well. The right range to stock price, margin,

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timing, phasing, seasonal changes. And

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they're the things that make or break when it comes to delivering more profit.

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So going into a real world example on demand forecasting. For example,

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I once worked with a fashion retailer who said every

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year I seem to sell out of the same knitwear and every

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year I reorder too late. And then they'd got into

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that stock in a rut so they didn't know how much to order. Because by

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selling out, they didn't have a good demand profile to tell them what the opportunity

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was. And if it's too time consuming to

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analyze the past sales patterns, seasonalities, out of stock, lost

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sales potential and everything else along those lines, what AI can

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do is quickly zip through the data

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and give you the insight you need. So it doesn't mean you have to

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blindly follow it, you still have to overlay common sense and good

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judgment. But it should mean that you're no longer guessing

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or having things to firefight. It's much more planned.

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So by choosing better information in this scenario,

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you'd have fewer missed sales, you'd know what your demand

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profile actually looked like, you'd have the right depth of

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stock on the right lines, and you wouldn't be panic buying

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under ordering or ordering too late and missing the opportunity.

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Similarly, going down the same line of stock, there's a point about

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the spotting the issues before they hurt. So another example

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is a homeware retailer and they realized in

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January that a category has been underperforming all

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autumn. Well, it's a bit too late then. If you were using AI,

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they could spot that much earlier on and flag. These lines seem to

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be selling slower than plan, or these lines seem to be

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taking a bit of a nosedive. They were very popular last year, but

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clearly customer requirements have changed. Or it might

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be maybe in a fashion setting. For example, sizes and

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colors that seem to just get consistently ignored, so

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need to be discounted to clear and not rebought. And it's also

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where you can identify the categories that look fine on turnover

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but are really poor on margin. So you ask yourself, am I wasting

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my time and my space and my effort? If it's not making the money,

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it might look like it's taking the money in the till, but if it's not

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delivering the cash to your pocket, is it worth it?

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So getting these early warning signs give you the chance to think about

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re merchandising, about pricing differently, to stop or

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start reordering. And it doesn't take away the

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creativity and skill that you you have to use to go into range

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selection and understanding the customer. But it

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protects your creativity by taking the

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dross off your hands. I've mentioned

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pricing, obviously, and discounting is one of the most tricky

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decisions in retail, because sometimes we discount out of panic

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because we think, oh no, the stock isn't going to move. And sometimes we

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discount too far because we think it has to be 50%

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off, when actually you'd have stimulated the sales by just

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25% off. And again, AI can be used to

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remove some of those knee jerk decisions by showing

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patterns in the data. So which promotional types

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increased sales volume without reducing too

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much margin. So promotional depth, in terms of the cut of the

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price of promotional types, in terms of

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which ones were stickiest with customers, it might be three

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for two, it might be 20% off or it might be

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that there's free gift wrapping involved and that in itself is a

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promotion. It highlights something that might inspire someone to buy

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because it's a value add. We also can use this to work

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out where pricing decisions have just thrown away margin

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because perhaps sales haven't increased and we can look

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at what customers bought in any case. Now I remember an

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example and it's many years ago I was doing a piece of work with

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a team at Thresher, if you remember them.

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Unfortunately they went into administration years ago, but

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they were having some difficulty with some of their ranges

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and the team asked us to go and sit in a supplier review where one

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of the beer suppliers came in and trying to explain to them that

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when they put a product on promotion during a bank

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holiday weekend or a major football event or something like that, where they

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would normally see an increase in sales anyway, they were just throwing away

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the money. But actually that had been going on for

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months before anybody identified it. And AI would be the sort of thing that

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could be used to do that. You know, quiet sales assistant and tap

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you on the shoulder with alerts on the that just say you don't want to

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drop that price. That's going too far. Along the same vein,

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it also helps free up people for doing what really matters

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instead of trawling through spreadsheets and getting hung up

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on all that admin. It means the time

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that's saved can be given back to talking to customers, to better staff

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training, maybe to styling the window

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and make more imaginative decisions. Displays that actually then boost

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sales. And honestly, I've seen retailers who spend hours

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every week offloading reports from an epos, trying to

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join them together in Excel because the epos doesn't give them quite what they want.

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Trying to make sense of the spreadsheets and then thinking, what if I've missed

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something? It's all about the heavy lifting. AI can handle

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that. People handle the people, the

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judgment, creativity, the relationships, that's really important. And

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people have to know how to drive AI. They have to know what to

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ask the data to do to give them the answers to

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the questions they want to ask. So it's Just like any system,

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there's a saying, crap in, crap out. And it's true.

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It's just when there's a lot more data kicking around, sometimes

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it's easy to miss things.

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So AI is not, in my opinion, going to

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take over retail jobs. I think especially on the shop

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floor. It protects them. And from an E commerce point of view, it

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can be used to provide customer service and

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chatbot and information that can be quickly delivered.

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And then if the customer still needs to speak to a human, they can.

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But it's taken away some of the quick and easy questions

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and it's helping to take away repetitive admin. The best shop

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floor staff, they want to be on the shop floor, they want to be talking

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to people or making the merchandising look great, and they don't want to be sat

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at a desk with a spreadsheet. Now, when it comes to using an

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AI tool, you do not need to do everything at once. So

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it's best to start with just one area. For me, it would be things

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like on shelf availability, overstocks or

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margin analysis so that you're picking up where

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you've got high risk of obsolescence and discounting

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high risk of lost sales and also making sure that what you

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have got on the shop floor is delivering the business. And as you get used

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to it, you can learn over time and build in more and

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more. And I think to reiterate as well, we can't forget that it's

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all about the people who are making the decisions. All the AI is

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doing is understanding patterns and then reporting

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those to you because you've told it what you want to know.

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It's not going to take over the community, the customer, the brand

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values, or the basic intuition that everyone has

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to have to run a retail business. So let's set

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some managed expectations. AI is not going to

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fix poor buying, replace leadership and management,

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or magically boost your profits. What it does is

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it highlights blind spots, speeds up data analysis

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and reduces mistakes. And all of that really matters in a

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tough retail climate. Retail has always been about

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judgment and it doesn't remove it, it simply sharpens it and

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informs it. The future isn't technology versus people. I've

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always said technology is an enabler and tools should

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be used to help people do their jobs better. My

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advice is start small, keep it practical,

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and just use AI to begin with to get better at the basics. Because the

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retailers who thrive aren't just chasing the shiny gimmicky things like

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virtual reality or whatever. Next, they make calm confident

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decisions every day that support customer loyalty and sales. So that's

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it. I'm Claire Bailey, the retail champion, and this has been Retail

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Reckoning. If this episode reassured you or sparked an idea,

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please share it with someone who needs clarity and not hype. Yeah.

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Retail Reckoning. Retail

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Reckoning. No space for dusty

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shelves.

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Owns the floor.

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Sam.