Using AI to Move From Automation to Action

This article is brought to you by Modisoft. 

Automating an invoice or document upload can save a retailer several tedious minutes of work. That might not seem a lot, but when you multiply those minutes across the documents, reports and processes that a business handles each week, it adds up. Automation can give operators a lot of time back to focus on business growth and strategy. 

“You can look at it as staff augmentation,” said Safi Modi, head of growth at Modisoft. “The store manager can now focus less on the manual, day-by-day operation and more on what they need to do to improve the business holistically.” 

Modi describes that shift as “working on the business instead of in the business.” And AI can help with that too, he said. 

For starters, AI tools can create better visibility into the business. They can review more information than a person can, flag issues and errors quickly and find trends and patterns that a person might miss or not have time to look for themselves, Modi said. 

For example, it’s easy to see which products are a retailer’s top and bottom sellers. It is harder to recognize when a product between those extremes suddenly gains or loses momentum. Finding those changes manually may require repeated week-over-week analysis.

“There’s a lot of data that the back office hosts that you don’t know what to do with,” Modi said, adding that AI can help retailers connect information that might otherwise remain isolated in individual sales, inventory and payroll reports. “Retailers don’t need more data, they need analysis and insights gleaned from the data they already have,” said Modi. “It’s great for a software to tell you that your beverage department generated $5,000 in sales. But what do you do with that information?”

AI analysis can also lead to better strategic decision making. Insights generated by AI can inform product selection, shelf space allocations, inventory ordering and store operations, such as how many employees to staff during certain shifts. Sunny, Modisoft’s AI assistant, is designed to give operators a conversational way to explore their business data and receive summaries, insights and recommendations. Sunny Agents are AI-powered agents that help operators take action. “Sunny agents really reduce manual work—they can update price groups, item costs, retail prices, inventory and other routine business processes on their own. Sunny doesn’t just help you understand your business better, it can actually make decisions for you.” 

As automation takes over invoice entry, expense processing and other repetitive tasks, retailers can reinvest the time they save into higher-value work. That could mean improving execution, evaluating customer feedback or identifying new opportunities for business growth. “Retailers can instead focus on strategies that will generate more revenue,” Modi said. 

This is the second in a two-part article series from Modisoft. Read more in part one, which explored operational challenges that AI can help solve.

Artificial Intelligence Back office