For small, product-based businesses, managing inventory well is a matter of survival. Order too much, and you’re drowning in carrying costs. Order too little and you lose sales, tank your rankings, and frustrate loyal customers.
At the same time, understanding the ins and outs of inventory management is also a heavy lift, especially when you’re a solopreneur running a business on your own.
“As a company, we’re selling through our website, through Amazon, through QuickBooks to manage our wholesale accounts, we drop ship on Nordstrom: We’ve got all these different channels that we’re trying to manage,” Jen Podany, the founder of the ultraviolet and sun protection brand Bluestone Sunshields, told Business Insider. Lacking a single, cohesive place to understand sales and projections across disparate platforms, inventory management was one of Podany’s biggest challenges as a small operator, she said.
Matt Martian Williams for BI
Steffy Lee Simms, the founder of the eco-conscious children’s clothing brand Guava Jammies, said that the “multi-level lift” of managing inventory was particularly challenging, requiring her to build her own spreadsheets from scratch, determine which metrics actually mattered, and manually crunch the numbers to understand what to buy and when. “All of those small decisions became a bottleneck for me,” she said.
In the past year, these solopreneurs said they have discovered ways that generative AI can alleviate that lift and help them make smarter inventory decisions, faster.
AI dashboards improve supply chain planning
Both founders said they first turned to AI to help them organize and digest all the data that goes into understanding inventory.
Podany worked with a consultant, Don Kassing, to build an AI-assisted system that is integrated into Airtable, a database and spreadsheet tool. The AI pulls live data from all her channels into easy-to-understand dashboards. It tracks current stock, incoming inventory, and channel-by-channel sales, then gives her a daily view of what inventory she needs across all her sales channels, what she should be producing or assembling that week, and an eight-week forecast that flags supplier orders before they become urgent, Podany said.
Since implementing the system, her web sales are up 6% year to date, and her Amazon sales are up 97% — in large part, she said, because she’s no longer losing ground to stockouts. “When it comes to Amazon, if you do all this work on ads and then stock out, you damage everything you’ve put in up until then,” Podany said.
Matt Martian Williams for BI
Lee Simms said she largely relied on built-in AI tools on Shopify, an e-commerce platform, which can give her information on product performance, tell her when it’s time to place a reorder, and suggest products that are worth scaling. She also uses Gemini’s integration into Google Sheets to generate suggestions for custom tables and formulas that help her with decision-making.
“Being able to place very specific order quantities based on forecasting models that my bot has generated for me has helped me to be more efficient in communicating with my manufacturer,” Simms told Business Insider, adding that she’s been able to reduce textile waste with AI forecasting.
Inventory-based AI marketing drives sales
Lee Simms said she also uses AI to plan marketing campaigns that can help her move inventory based on sales data.
She uses the AI-powered tool Klaviyo for her email marketing, which integrates directly with her Shopify inventory data and then uses AI to generate suggested campaigns based on the products she has in stock. For example, she shared that this is especially useful for promoting products that only have a few items left, which were previously challenging to sell.
“What’s better than logging into your email management system and seeing three campaigns already made based on your current inventory?” she said. “I’m able to offload inventory a lot quicker without having to use my own capacity to make the decision.”
Lila Lee for BI
Reduced mental load opens up growth opportunities
Perhaps the most meaningful impact of AI-driven inventory management has been in reducing mental fatigue, said Lee Simms.
Lee Simms said she used to feel paralyzed by decision-making when it came to managing her inventory. Working with AI tools has helped her move past that, she said. “It’ll give me a very justified, quantifiable reason why I can just go ahead and move forward,” she says, such as suggesting items to reorder for a certain season with past sales data to back it up. “It’s helped me make wiser business decisions.”
She added that she now has more mental space to focus on opportunities to expand her business, such as adding a women’s wear line — something she says wouldn’t have been feasible without AI supporting the analytical lift of her business operations.
“As solopreneurs, we carry so much mental load,” Lee Simms said. “Finding the tools that create space in your mind is the best way to optimize.”
