Moving stock

Shops, wholesalers, importers, online stores, garden centres and builders' merchants are the largest single category of business in Europe. There are 5.8 million of them, close to one in every six firms on the continent. What they all have in common is that almost everything they did today, they will do again tomorrow.

Most of that repetition was solved a long time ago. Tills, stock systems and online storefronts handle the ninety-five percent of the day that looks the same every day, and they handle it well. The difficulty was never the volume. It is the tail: the order that never arrived, the pallet a supplier quietly moved by a week, the customer who wants the same thing in blue, the invoice that does not match the delivery note. Agents are good at the tail precisely because the tail is the part that does not fit a form. For example, reading a supplier's vague email and working out what the new date actually is. Noticing that one product has come back eleven times this month and telling somebody before it comes back a twelfth. Drafting the reply to the customer who has now asked twice, in the voice the shop actually uses.

These businesses also have one other thing in common: margins that do not forgive a wasted hour. An agent that saves a person forty minutes a day is not a productivity story here. It is the difference between a good month and an average one.

That being said, these are businesses that have been sold software before, and a good deal of it made the day longer rather than shorter. To that end, our embedding process starts from what a team already has open. For example, your agent works inside the inbox and the group chat you use now, and does not become another screen to check. It reads what your stock system already exports rather than asking you to move to a new one. And it shows its working, so when it tells you a delivery is late you can see the mail it read to decide that.

If you run a business that buys things and sells them, the tail is where your week goes. If you're interested in the advantages an agent can give your business, click here to let us know more about your business.