Talking Supply Chain: Drones, AI Drive Better Inventory Management

Have you ever walked through your warehouse and found old inventory? How about a Sony Playstation 2, circa 2000? Well, Gather AI found some PS2s sitting in a warehouse for a client in the last few years. The company also found over $1 million in “lost” inventory for a client.

Lost and missing inventory, including theft, is a multi-billion dollar problem for industry, and in many cases, the inventory isn’t actually missing. It is somewhere it shouldn’t be, or not accounted for. The  end result is businesses miss out on revenue or order extra inventory to meet demands, leading to increased carrying costs.

The problem is particularly acute in the retail industry, where Target has said that it expects profits to be as much as $1 billion lower this year due to shrink. A 2021 study by the National Retail Federation found that retailers lost $94.5 billion that year due to shrink, which includes shoplifting and organized crime.  But that same study found that 25.7% of shrink was due to what NRF called process and control failures – in other words, businesses just didn’t know where their inventory was located.

Gather AI, which is 2023’s NextGen Supply Chain Conference Solution Provider Award winner in AI, is leveraging off-the-shelf drone technology and artificial intelligence to monitor inventory levels.

Sean Mitchell, vice president of customer success for Gather AI, joined Talking Supply Chain host Brian Straight to discuss the company’s approach to inventory management, and the role technology can play in lowering inventory levels while still meeting customer demands.