Executive Summary :
Retail is going through a massive churn due to mounting inventory costs, inefficient supply chain management, a hyper-competitive marketplace, and rising labor costs. Additionally, retail companies need help to grasp the evolving customer behavior, demand for personalized services, and disruptions in digital channels. As competition upsurges, the value of digital technologies and automation solutions rises for retail organizations. Intelligent automation, cognitive automation, or hyper-automation is a game-changer for retail organizations. According to various studies, automation in merchandise planning or the supply chain is becoming a norm rather than an exception. Also, the current technology can automate half of the retail activities. Importantly, automation will lead to the creation of new jobs as companies invest in technology and processes.
Automation is a requirement for retail organizations
Intelligent automation would help the retailers to lower overhead costs, improve efficiency, and deliver personalized customer experiences. Retail automation leverages advanced innovative tools and technology to optimize processes and ensure overall efficacy. It includes AI-powered solutions to complete repetitive tasks that are time-consuming with errors. Advanced technological solutions are helping stakeholders monitor or compare inventory changes with point of sale (POS) data, which is a clear use case of retail automation. It enables the workforce to focus on core or complex activities that require human intervention. A few examples of retail automation are billing ERP, conversational chatbots, automated email campaigns, POS, and inventory tracking solutions. Adopting the latest technologies across operations and processes is now necessary for retailers.
Examples of Retail Automation Implementation
Inventory Management
An automated inventory management system vastly reduces human requirements while delivering real-time visibility, faster results, and reduced errors. Intelligent bots powered by advanced algorithms analyze historical sales data to give stakeholders insights about the optimum stock level. The marketing team also accesses insights to identify the best-selling products for more data-driven strategies.
Customer Service
RPA bots with conversational AI capabilities can handle customer service tasks for an improved and personalized customer experience. A powerful AI-powered chatbot can complete tasks like answering customer questions, providing product information, tracking shipping, and more. You can understand the customer better, automate manual customer service tasks, develop strategies, and be available 24/7 with intelligent automation.
Invoice automation
An automated invoice process with automated checks will reduce the likelihood of fraud. Plus, the Invoice automation offers near real-time visibility into the accounts payable process for better cash management. We are seeing new technological advancements, including the broad adoption of large language models and the latest GPT models in accounting.
Future of Retail Automation Strategies I
ntelligent automation implementations in the retail industry are skyrocketing. Organizations are evaluating existing strategies to identify opportunities for automation while calculating the investment and time for successful retail automation implementation. The road ahead is finding the right balance between human activities and automated workflows. The automation requirement will be different for every organization. To stay competitive in the evolving and digitized retail environment, companies must assess the potential of automation technologies concerning their operational requirements. With the increase in advanced mobile technologies, online shopping sites are becoming the place for consumers. AI-powered retail automation would become crucial to help enterprises run their business better and cost-effectively.