No garment, regardless of how durable, how locally sourced, how biodegradable, how persistently it will probably be recycled, can ever be as sustainable because the garment that was never made.

With that eye toward sustainability, in addition to cutting waste from the expense line, Rachel Liaw launched Fuse Inventory in 2016, a hyper-advanced version of the Excel spreadsheet still getting used by many firms.

“The concept [of building supply chain software] seems quite simple — you simply forecast your demand and you simply buy that, but there’s at all times disruptions, and I believe the pandemic really shone a highlight on what happens when these disruptions multiply and you possibly can not just throw people at the issue,” Liaw said.

AI-driven inventory tracking is in a position to form forecasts from historical and current sales, price fluctuations, order quantity based on lead time, seasonality, promotions and product launches in addition to market outliers reminiscent of natural disasters and pandemics. This compacted crunch of information is definitely digested by SaaS, or software as a service, systems and goals to assist businesses hedge how much inventory they may need and where best to sell it.

Fuse has found its biggest success with consumer packaged goods brands, particularly in beauty and cosmetics. Fashion is a far trickier inventory type to administer, though, resulting from its ongoing issues with size, color and magnificence, in addition to the quickly changing nature of fashion trends.

It’s a challenge that U.K.-based AI software company Sparkbox.AI is embracing head-on with its AI-based inventory model.

“We take data from retailers on a every day or weekly basis and we’re using machine learning to essentially understand how each product in each region or zone inside their business will proceed to perform from a requirement perspective,” said Sparkbox.AI cofounder Lindsay Fisher.

“We wanted to construct fashion first to prove that we could solve the harder forecasting problem first.”

Fisher said a lot of Sparkbox.AI’s clients to this point are of what is perhaps called the “fast-fashion” variety.

“Our goal is to assist those retailers fulfill the demand in essentially the most responsible way,” Fisher said. “If we may also help people right-size their buys it means they should purchase less and still grow their business.”

Other software systems are attempting to corral all the customer-facing interfaces with back-office needs — including human resources, supply chain logistics, merchandising and inventory tracking — under one software umbrella.

In recent times, this has come to be referred to as unified commerce — distinct from the better-known term omnichannel, which applies only to the sales portion of the positioning seen by the patron. The argument for unified commerce, as Aptos’ senior director, global omni-solution principal senior director Steve Ross puts it, is the concept the entire is bigger than the sum of its parts.

“One plus one equals three-squared,” Ross said. “I’ve got clients who’ve got multiple solutions, but by having a synergy of solutions, you’re gaining more value than would a stand-alone order management system.…Unified commerce is the sum of all those systems working together and being greater than they’d be alone.”

Aptos delivers AI-assisted inventory software akin to those provided by Fuse Inventory and Sparkbox.Ai, but Aptos also works primarily with larger-scale firms like Latest Balance, North Face and Skechers.

Dustin Jones, founder and chief executive officer of the brand new Unified Commerce Group, has his eyes set on smaller fish; start-ups which have been around for seven to 10 years and are valued between $20 million and $70 million. He says artificial intelligence in inventory is of “zero use” for these businesses until they grow into three or 4 brands, by which era he hopes to have already given them their “parachute exit” by purchasing their company.

“We do use AI for site merchandising, which is a extremely useful gizmo,” Jones said. “But we’re focused on smaller-scale businesses where [inventory] demand planning is far more within the omnichannel capability— what number of small, medium, large, extra large, etc., to get right versus big company demand planning problems where they’re overbuying and it results in a landfill.”

JD Chauvet, CEO of Lightspeed Commerce, a Montreal-based e-commerce software company that traces its roots back to 2005 when Apple Stores first began disrupting the concept of checkout registers focuses on how inventory may be tracked and exacted right right down to the point-of-sale device.

“[A client] can access order inventory levels from the POS, and what we do is automate reorder points, so we all know once you’re running out of inventory and we’ll let you know, you’ve got to order 10 whatever since you’re running out of stock,” Chauvet said. “After which on the [supplier] end, they receive the order, fill the order, they ship the order to the shop, and when the shop receives the order, and so they scan it, it mechanically populates the POS with all the info [of the items contained].”

Chauvet’s company focuses on retail — mostly fashion — and restaurants. The latter, he uses for an example of how AI technology may be used to not only right-size inventory, but to right-size it for every individual customer.

“We have now an insight engine and we call it the magic quadrant of menu management,” Chauvet said, adding that a chef will typically say their best menu item can be the one which sells most. “We’ll find a way to inform them, ‘Oh, well if it truly is your best menu item, how come each time a person returns to your restaurant, they never order it again? With data and analytics we are able to understand behaviors; I can see a consumer from one store to the following and I can see a returning visitor through tokenization.”

Tokenization is the encryption of sensitive data, reminiscent of anonymizing the spending behaviors related to a bank card number, information that may be gotten through booking reservations through certain apps, or, theoretically through loyalty programs. What wine do they like? Are they meat eaters? Big spenders? Through their bank card footprints, diners’ tastes may be followed to other restaurants, too.

“What are the trends? What do people eat? We feed that back to the restaurants in order that they can readjust their menus,” Chauvet said. “If tuna belly and toro tuna is the trend of the month, we are able to see all of the restaurants which have it are selling out of it like hot cakes, so it is best to put that in your menu.”

But software isn’t the one way by which businesses are using AI to right-size their inventory.

Earlier this 12 months, American Eagle Outfitters said it was partnering with startup Radar to put in RFID (radio frequency identification) sensors and tags on apparel in 500 of its stores.

With this technology, retailers are in a position to take inventory tracking from the Excel sheet to GPS, enabling them to know not only how much of a certain item is in stock, but exactly where it’s.

“We combined the XYZ coordinate data of the RFID tags with the 3D coordinate data of where persons are, so principally each sensor has these 4 cameras on the circumference that extract the 3D pose of individuals,” Radar founder Spencer Hewett said.

Hewett said he hopes someday soon to expand the technology in order to eliminate the necessity for checkout lines entirely.

“In case you can locate every item and every body, and people people had their payment information saved on the app on their phone, and between these three signals we could charge them for what they left with,” Hewett said.