River Island steps up Nextail tech roll-out

River Island is set to implement Nextail’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered stock optimisation platform across its UK stores during the early part of 2020.

This builds on trials involving the retailer’s distribution hub and selected stores, announced last year. River Island’s CIO Doug Gardner said at the time: “The main return on investment of cloud computing, AI and automation is not about cost savings, it is more about enabling us to be an agile organisation that is able to adapt rapidly.”

Rasheed Ibrahim, IT Training Manager, comments on the River Island careers page:  “The [team in the] distribution hub use the replenishment module which has replaced ODBMS. It then uses data-driven logic to forecast demand and replenish to stores with the highest probability of sales. This is done through machine learning, so it learns from previous experiences, without being explicitly programmed and automatically improves future forecasts.”

He adds: “Selected trial stores can use the app to access key information that allows them to monitor performance in their store. They can use it to review their bestsellers, identify previous bestsellers where (if!) sales have dropped off and see products that are selling well for the company but not in their store.”

Sign up for our free retail technology newsletter here.