For small, product-based businesses, properly managing inventory is a matter of survival. If you order too much, shipping costs will increase. Ordering too few will result in lower sales, lower rankings, and dissatisfied loyal customers.
At the same time, understanding the ins and outs of inventory management can be a daunting task, especially if you’re a solopreneur running your own business.
“As a company, we sell through our website, Amazon, Quickbooks to manage our wholesale accounts, we do dropshipping at Nordstrom. We have all these different channels and we’re trying to manage them,” Jen Podany, founder of UV and sunscreen brand Bluestone Sunshield, told Business Insider. Inventory management has been one of the biggest challenges for Podani as a small business, she said, as there is no single cohesive place to understand sales and forecasts across disparate platforms.
Podany said generative AI tools make difficult inventory management easier. BI’s Matt Marchand-Williams
Steffy Lee Sims, founder of eco-friendly children’s clothing brand Guava Jammies, said the “multi-level lift” of inventory management is particularly difficult, requiring her to build her own spreadsheets from scratch, determine which metrics are actually important, and manually crunch numbers to understand what to buy and when. “All these little decisions became a bottleneck for me,” she said.
Over the last year, these solopreneurs say they’ve discovered how generative AI can help alleviate that rise and make smarter inventory decisions faster.
Improve supply chain planning with AI dashboards
Both founders said they first turned to AI to organize and digest all the data needed to understand inventory.
Podany worked with consultant Don Cassing to build an AI-assisted system that integrates with Airtable, a database and spreadsheet tool. AI brings live data from all channels into easy-to-understand dashboards. Podany says it tracks current inventory, incoming inventory, and sales by channel, and provides an eight-week forecast daily that tells you what inventory is needed across all sales channels, what to produce or assemble that week, and supplier orders before they become urgent.
Since implementing this system, her web sales have increased 6% since the beginning of the year, and her Amazon sales have increased 97%. The main reason for that, she said, is because it no longer stalls due to out-of-stock items. “For Amazon, if you put all this work into an ad and then it goes out of stock, everything you’ve worked for goes away,” Podany said.
Airtable’s AI-assisted dashboard allows for more strategic planning, Podany said. BI’s Matt Marchand-Williams
Lee Simms said he relies primarily on AI tools built into e-commerce platform Shopify. This tool can provide information about product performance, let you know when to reorder, and suggest products worth expanding on. Also, use Gemini’s integration with Google Sheets to generate custom table and formula suggestions to help you make decisions.
“Being able to place very specific order quantities based on the predictive models generated by the bot has made our communication with manufacturers more efficient,” Sims told Business Insider, adding that AI predictions have helped reduce textile waste.
Inventory-based AI marketing drives sales
Lee Simms said the company also leverages AI to plan marketing campaigns to help move inventory based on sales data.
She uses the AI-powered tool Klaviyo for email marketing. The tool integrates directly with Shopify inventory data and uses AI to generate suggested campaigns based on the products you have in stock. For example, she shared that this is especially useful for promoting limited quantities of products that were previously difficult to sell.
“There’s nothing better than logging into your email management system and seeing the three campaigns you’ve already created based on your current inventory,” she said. “You don’t have to use your own abilities to make decisions, and you can unload inventory much more quickly.”
Lee Simms said AI can help reduce mental fatigue when making inventory decisions. Lila Lee of BI
Reducing mental load opens up opportunities for growth
Perhaps the most meaningful effect of AI-powered inventory management is reducing mental fatigue, says Lee Sims.
Lee Sims said she felt paralyzed in decision-making when it came to inventory management. She said she was able to overcome that by leveraging AI tools. “This gives me a very good, quantitative reason to move forward,” she says, including backing up past sales data and suggesting products to reorder in a particular season. “This allows us to make smarter business decisions.”
She added that she now has the mental space to focus on opportunities to expand her business, such as adding a women’s clothing line. She says this would not have been possible without AI’s improved analytical capabilities for business operations.
“As solopreneurs, we have so much mental strain on us,” Lee Sims said. “Finding tools that create space in your mind is the best way to optimize.”