The point-of-sale and retail management system now uses artificial intelligence to provide custom business tips.
Vend has introduced a new AI digital assistant called Dott to its system. Dott is designed to analyse the information that a retailer processes and stores in Vend, and then make specific suggestions about the next thing to do to help grow the business.
“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,” said Vend founder Vaughan Rowsell.
The name comes from the idea of helping retailers “join the dots”.
Dott will learn from the tens of thousands of retailers in 140 countries that use the Vend platform across 140 countries. Initially, its suggestions will cover customer engagement and inventory management.
Later, Dott will be able to alert retailers to new product trends and changing customer behaviour, remind them to replenish stock or fulfil an order, and analyse sales trends and provide suggestions on promotions to run or which customers should be re-engaged.
This is just the first step in Vend's adoption of AI. The company plans to increase the size of its product and engineering teams by 25 percent over the next six months in order to take more advantage of AI and big data. Vacancies exist at its Auckland office for software engineers, product managers and product designers.
Vend is also looking to help retailers take advantage of online retail channels such as Facebook and Instagram.
“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,” said Vaughan.
