Future of commerce: AI-augmented automated retailing and merchandising on AWS

Ingredients of market competitiveness and customer delight

Retail enterprises must harness the power of AI with high-dimensional, concurrent, always-on optimization to enable retailers to hyper-localize and optimize their assortment, space and pricing strategies in an integrated way, with greater speed and precision in decision-making.

New age retail platforms must include 

• Macro space optimization - Optimize space to drive autonomous space strategies
• Price, promotion & markdown optimization - Unify price, promotion and markdown decisions for sales growth 
• Omnichannel assortment optimization - Complete customers basket across channels considering demand transferability
• Fashion assortment - Predict the success of new style, set initial price right leveraging computer vision capabilities
• Self-learning supply chain - Use AI-ML for concurrent optimization across supply chain KPIs, replenishment plans and forecasting 

Driving higher sales and customer centricity

• Help retailers improve sales and margins by localizing the product mix, right sizing space, and pricing competitively
• Reduce out-of-stock and over-stock across channels, with the right mix and right space
• Use predictive models to improve price competitiveness and mitigate margin erosion through strategic, responsive, and preemptive pricing mechanism
• De-risk investments through quick simulation, analysis, and accurate forecasting
• Measure in-store shelf compliance and ensure last mile execution of merchandising strategy 

AI in retail

• Improves accuracy and precision of strategic insights with predictive analysis
• Manages and analyzes ample data in reduced time and efforts
• Helps identify and understand the shoppers' buying patterns
• Identifies gaps between demand and supply that can be monitored on a real-time basis 
• Assists in identifying growth and driving sales with the implementation of AI in retail 
• Allows easy space utilization, placement of products, and pricing strategy 

What Author Says

Key takeaways

TCS Optumera is a fit-for-purpose product

• The product fits the process. TCS leverages the deep contextual knowledge and robust domain experiences that spans over decades and over 100+ retailers •
• Optumera enables integrated space, assortment, pricing and supply chain optimization powered by 35+ patents, indigenously hand-crafted algorithmsin TCS labs in collaboration with premierglobal institutes •
• Microservices based architecture on AWS, helps retailers of any scale to swiftly leverage product features, enables addition of new functionalitiesforspecificbusinessrequirements