How SAP’s clients plan to leverage its new AI tools for retailers

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that artificial intelligence dominated the conversion at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show last week. Brands are looking to capitalize on the technology in ways that can smooth over processes across the board, from customer service to human resources.

Ahead of and during the conference, software company SAP was one of a handful of businesses that introduced and demonstrated new AI tools it said will help retailers increase profits and customer loyalty through consumer insights and data that would be otherwise more difficult to consolidate without the help of AI.

• SAP debuted a predictive demand planning solution that provides users with more accurate and longer-range forecasts for product demand across channels.
• Additionally, the company is phasing in “store replenishment capabilities” that factors in demand volatility, business targets, and supply constraints to find out order volume at the lowest expected cost, according to a company release.

For SAP, predictive demand planning involves using an algorithm on top of real-time data to help retailers adapt to shifting consumer behaviors, Kristin Howell, global VP of retail solution management at SAP, told Retail Brew.

“Historically, you would have looked in the rearview mirror—what happened last season, what happened last month, what happened last week?” Howell said. “With that shifting consumer demand pattern, that demand signal…is just not strong enough.”

During NRF, Howell moderated a discussion between two executives who have or are planning to introduce AI capabilities into their operations. Karen Etzkorn, chief information officer at Qurate Retail Group, which owns QVC and HSN, said the company has more ideas of how it can leverage AI in future as the technology becomes more sophisticated but currently is building out its SAP program to build out its documentation so they don’t need as many tech writers to write scripts for their programming.

• As for those ideas, Etzkorn said Qurate hopes to leverage AI-driven data for semantic search on their website and help answer questions for consumers. Quarate has built out proof of concepts for these use cases and eventually plans to to roll out these capabilities across all of its markets.

“AI is going to be embedded in everything we do,” she said. “As we think about the future of work and we think about knowledge workers and what type of skills and capabilities you’re going to need to bring into your organization and into a retail environment…you have to start thinking about your AI strategy for the next three to five years and mapping out ‘What does my workforce look like? How does it change? How does it need to adapt?’”

For the time being, AI can’t physically deliver furniture from a distribution center or store to a customers home, which is why Havertys Furniture is tinkering around with the technology to help its backend operations, which includes chat agents who handle customers’ questions, external and internal search requests from customers and employees, respectively, and IT.

• But as Havertys’s SVP and chief human resources officer Kelly Fladger explained, the company wants to emphasize that AI will not be used to take away jobs, but rather simplify more complicated tasks.

“Because as we think as most companies look at AI, they look at it from more of an optimization perspective, and they always think, ‘Oh, it’s going to take away jobs,’” he said. “We have to do it in a humane way to where we have the appropriate guardrails and we know what we’re doing and putting in is something that we can live with.”