Insights
The future of retail forecasting: AI-powered predictive customer forecasting
Beyond the Hype: Realizing AI's potential in retail How do you drive tangible business results through AI? We’ve partnered with top...
Customers are unpredictable. Trends come and go. Margins are razor thin. Hind sighting rarely applies to today’s everchanging markets.
Traditional retail forecasting fails to accurately predict the two most crucial success factors: the number of customers who will shop at a retailer and how much they will spend.
To succeed in this challenging environment, retailers need to harness the power of AI to understand which customer value drivers really matter, how they can improve them for maximum impact and which financial planning scenarios will help them achieve their growth targets while protecting their margins.
The AlixPartners AI Profit Engine enables retailers with machine learning–powered capabilities to optimize pricing and promotion, inventory and assortment, and marketing strategies to achieve profitable sales growth.
Customer at the Core
We integrate hundreds of internal and external data sources into the AI Model to predict customer and revenue demand with high accuracy.
Dynamic Sensitivities
Leveraging the power of AI, we structure what-if analyses on critical business investments to identify the optimal strategies that drive profitable growth.
Key Growth Drivers
Our insights inform the most important levers to drive business impact: marketing, assortment, and pricing decisions — ensuring that every dollar spent delivers maximum business impact.
The engine’s output can inform annual budgets, validate quarterly guidance and allow retailers to test promotional strategies before deploying them.
"Implementing AlixPartners’ AI-driven customer forecasting model was a game-changer for our business. For the first time, we had real-time visibility into the levers driving customer growth, allowing us to fine-tune pricing, marketing, and inventory decisions with confidence. The impact was immediate—improved short- and long-term forecast accuracy, stronger margins, and a more agile response to market shifts. This approach didn’t just refine our planning; it transformed the way we operate."
AI Profit Engine’s essential levers to drive decision-making
Pricing and promotions
Addresses all aspects of pricing by aligning the strategy and ensuring price setting and execution maximize their intended impact.
Assortment and inventory
Links assortment to a customer plan; detailed segmentation shapes inventory buys and allocation across retail stores and e-commerce
Marketing and loyalty
Establishes optimal spend level, channel mix, targeting and segmentation to maximize effectiveness, customer lifetime value and profitability.
Tariffs
The AlixPartners AI Profit Engine was designed for times like these, when tariffs are causing upheaval across the retail industry. The tool is designed to look across all aspects of the business – starting with cost and margin, and including pricing and promotional strategies – when real-time scenario planning is needed now more than ever.
