Vend introduces artificial intelligence partner to help smaller retailers

Vend, a point-of-sale and retail management software firm, has launched Dott.

Dott is an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for retail stores and part of the new Vend platform, aiming to help retailers make better decisions about their stores and how to expand growth. Dott works within Vend to provide suggestions and tips for users based on real-time activity.

It supposedly learns about a retailer and their business through analysing sales, product, customer and inventory information, thus making personalised suggestions on how to grow their business.

Vend’s founder, Vaughan Rowsell, said: “AI means many things to different people, from talking to Siri to autonomous cars.

“We wanted to simply present Vend as if you had a partner in your retail business that greeted you every day and was keeping an eye on things 24/7, making really smart suggestions on what to do next to grow.”

In its first iteration, this will include surfacing ways to engage with customers and keep them coming back, and how to best report on their inventory to keep the right products in stock.

As it learns and develops further, Dott should be able to tell its users about new product trends and customer behaviour, providing reminders to replenish stock or fulfil an order, or analyse a retailer’s sales trends and provide suggestions on promotions to run.

Vend is planning to grow its product and engineering teams by 25 per cent in the next six months, so to develop in new areas of AI and big data, as well as building for other platforms and retail channels, like Facebook and Instagram.

Vaughan continued: “Vend is the only pure cloud-based retail POS platform for inventory-based retailers.

“Introducing Dott means the system can learn things about retail and develop insights that haven’t been available before for small-to-medium retail store owners. We’re really pumped about this launch.”

Dott, in its first iteration, is live on the Vend platform from today (November 22).

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