Today’s businesses survive depending on how effectively they can sense and react to situations in a dynamic and unpredictable world. Influences from geopolitical issues, weather and diseases to rapidly changing customer expectations will require businesses to make decisions at the edge.
Traditional approaches to retailing, which includes forward-looking multi-seasonal planning, merchandising, sourcing and supply-chain decisions, are strangling retail companies. The proof is in the spate of recent bankruptcies. All of these organizations had one common factor — a complete mismatch between demand and supply.

Business models, when examined granularly, are made of two elements: data and decisions. Data, the new oil, is now abundant and getting richer by the minute; and in turn, decisions need to be made rapidly at the edge of the organization — where demand meets supply. The key to leveraging Artificial Intelligence in your business is to understand that machines can crunch enormous amounts of data, find patterns and trends in that data, provide scenarios to key decision makers in the value chain, and make those decisions when they need to be made in a split second. Using AI, businesses can move all critical decisions including Capital Budgeting, Merchandising, Sourcing, Supply Chain, Allocation and Fulfillment closer to the market and closer to the season, and design multiple levels of supply chain to suggest mitigation strategies, deciding how — and where — to fulfill a customer request from.