One count, every channel, every morning.
Physical, online, and omnichannel operators: businesses where the margin lives in 1,000 small operational calls a week, most of them made by hand.
Where does AI actually pay in retail?
Three places, in our experience. These are the clearest wins we see in shops like yours, not results we promise. In every one, the machine does the counting and the watching; the merchant keeps the call on what goes on the shelf.
What the system says matches what is on the shelf.
Counts drift, channels disagree, and reorders get made on gut and memory. An automation reconciles stock across your channels and drafts the reorder before the gap becomes a stockout. You still decide what to buy.
The routine ticket answered fast, the hard one routed to a person.
Most of the queue is where-is-my-order, returns, and sizing. An agent drafts those replies from your real order data and escalates the angry, the odd, and the high-value to a human who can actually fix it.
Merchandising decisions start from a draft, not a blank sheet.
An agent assembles what is moving, what is stuck, and what last season says about next month, so the buying decision starts with the evidence on the table. The merchant still makes the call. We wrote about how the pattern-finding works, and where it stops, in The Prediction Engine.
For most retail operators the right first move is the AI Readiness Audit: two to four weeks mapping where the hours and the margin actually go before anyone builds anything. If a $25-a-month subscription might cover it, that question is answered squarely here. Pricing is published, in plain numbers: audits run $3,500–$8,500; sprints $18,000–$60,000, fixed quote in writing.
Two problems every retailer knows. Drawn before and after.
Illustrative vignettes, not client claims. In both, the machine reconciles and the buyer decides.
Three channels agree on one number before the doors open.
Before. The POS says eleven, the webstore says fourteen, and the marketplace listing says nine. Somebody sold the last two of something online that went out the door in-store on Saturday, so Monday brings a cancellation email and a marketplace metric nobody wanted. Meanwhile four hundred units of last season are sitting in the back that nobody has looked at since the buy. Reconciliation happens when someone has an afternoon, which is to say monthly, which is to say too late to act on.
After. Every morning an agent pulls counts from the POS, the webstore, the marketplace, and the receiving records, finds the lines that disagree, and proposes which source is right with the movement history that supports it. Oversell risk is flagged before it becomes a cancellation. Aging stock is surfaced with the weeks-of-cover behind it. A person approves before any count is written back to any system — and nothing is repriced, reordered, or relisted without that approval.
The win: the counts agree daily, so oversells stop and dead stock gets found while it is still worth marking down.The reorder is prepared; the buy is still yours.
Before. Reorder points are in someone’s head. Supplier confirmations arrive as email that gets skimmed, so a substitution or a delayed line is discovered at receiving. Returns get processed twice or not at all.
After. Purchase orders are drafted against real sell-through and real lead times, with the margin picture attached. Supplier confirmations are read and the exceptions — substitutions, partial fills, date changes — are surfaced when they arrive rather than when the truck does. Returns reconcile against the original order automatically. The buyer decides; the preparation is done.
The win: buying decisions get made on current numbers instead of remembered ones.Illustrative builds, not client claims. What we would actually scope is whatever your free assessment shows is worth automating first. The one build we can name is MARCUS, a private AI back office for a regulated lender — the same architecture, a different set of nouns.
AI for retail and e-commerce businesses.
Want the numbers?
The full price list is published — audits, sprints, managed services, all on one page.
Read the price list →01What can AI do for a retail business?+
Usually inventory reconciliation across channels — the daily work of making the shop floor, the webstore, and the marketplace listings agree with each other and with what is actually on the shelf, plus the supplier and returns paperwork that surrounds it.
02What does reconciliation across channels actually mean?+
Your POS says one count, the webstore says another, and the marketplace says a third. An agent pulls all three plus the receiving records, finds the lines that disagree, proposes which is right and why, and stages the corrections. A person approves before any count is written back.
03Will it change prices or place orders on its own?+
No. It prepares the reorder and flags the margin problem; a person decides. Nothing is purchased, repriced, or listed until someone approves it, and every approval is in the audit log.
04How much does it cost for a retailer?+
The AI Readiness Audit runs $3,500–$8,500; an AI Implementation Sprint runs $18,000–$60,000, quoted fixed in writing before work begins and guaranteed live within 90 days. For most retailers the first build is reconciliation, because oversell and dead stock are the two costs nobody has time to chase.
05How long does it take?+
The audit is 2 to 4 weeks. The first build is 4 to 12, and it carries the delivery guarantee: live within 90 days, or we keep building at no charge until it is.
06Do you work remotely or on-site?+
We keep hubs in Denver, Colorado and Phoenix, Arizona, so a shop within reach of either gets on-site time; the rest of the US is remote. Walking a stockroom in person helps once — the reconciliation work that follows runs the same remotely, at the same fixed price.
See the wins in retail.
30 minutes with a senior advisor who walks your inventory, support, and merchandising workflows and tells you what is worth automating, and what is not.
A fixed price, quoted in writing before we start, and a straight answer within 24 hours.
— Christopher Myers, Founder