How often does it happen that you see an ad for something great, go on a flashy website, chat with a smart AI chatbot, swipe through shiny products, build a basket instantaneously, make a fintec-powered purchase - only never to receive your product as it was actually out of stock?
The world of e-commerce is counting its chickens before they hatch, with a ubiquity of AI systems and cloud software and supertools that consistently go around the actual act of selling, while the core, the physical transaction, the actual movement of stock - is done (or fails to be done) over ancient systems, sometimes as ancient as spreadsheets or pen and paper!
It appears that it is a thousand times easier to implement sophisticated AI systems around the entire customer lifecycle, from sales predictions, advertising placement, customer support, website building, content generation and real time pricing, then it is to actually modernize the place where you store the actual goods at: your fulfillment center.
The fulfillment center is the beating heart of any e-commerce business. It orders new inventory, stores goods, maintains quality, fulfills orders and ships deliveries. The amount of value that can be unlocked from modernizing it is beyond compare. Yet over 90% of fulfillment centers still run the same way they used to for decades.
It’s time e-commerce players, logistics companies and retailers step up and modernize their fulfillment tech stack with AI and robotics. Until then, other AI software might eventually fail to deliver.