Modern Inventory Optimization: AI-Driven Strategies for Retail Pricing, Visibility, and Service Levels
Presented at Modernizing Retail — an executive event in partnership with ToolsGroup, Spinnaker SCA, and Planalytics.
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About This Session
This on-demand session is the standout presentation from Modernizing Retail — an executive event dedicated to retail excellence in the age of AI, pricing volatility, and inventory visibility gaps. The event was produced in partnership with ToolsGroup, Spinnaker SCA, and Planalytics, bringing together retail supply chain leaders to address the most pressing operational challenges of 2025.
Jeanette Barlow, Chief Product Officer at ToolsGroup, presents actionable strategies for adapting inventory optimization and pricing in today's dynamic retail market. The session covers AI-driven pricing optimization, the impact of economic pressures and inflation on retail inventory decisions, evolving customer demand behaviors, and how modern supply chain planning platforms can close the visibility gap between planning and execution.
What You'll Learn in This Session
AI-Driven Inventory Optimization
How modern AI approaches to inventory planning eliminate the service-versus-cost trade-off — achieving higher availability with lower working capital through probabilistic demand modeling.
Adaptive Pricing Under Economic Pressure
Strategies for adjusting retail pricing in response to inflation, input cost volatility, and shifting customer price sensitivity — without sacrificing margin or competitive position.
Closing the Retail Visibility Gap
How real-time demand signals and integrated planning platforms give retailers the visibility they need to make faster, more accurate inventory and replenishment decisions.
AI and Evolving Customer Behavior
How machine learning models capture shifts in customer purchasing behavior — including the impact of promotions, economic conditions, and channel mix — to keep forecasts accurate in a volatile market.
Speakers
Jeanette Barlow
Spinnaker SCA
Planalytics
Key Takeaways
- Modern inventory optimization eliminates the service-versus-cost trade-off. AI-driven probabilistic planning allows retailers to achieve higher on-shelf availability while simultaneously reducing total inventory investment.
- Pricing and inventory decisions must be connected, not siloed. Pricing changes directly affect demand patterns — planning systems that integrate pricing optimization with demand forecasting respond faster and more accurately to market shifts.
- Retail visibility gaps are a planning problem, not a data problem. Most retailers have sufficient data — the challenge is connecting demand signals to inventory and replenishment decisions in real time.
- Economic pressure requires adaptive, not static, pricing strategies. Retailers who update their pricing models in response to inflation, input costs, and competitor moves outperform those who rely on fixed pricing rules.
- AI models capture demand behavior shifts that traditional forecasting misses. Machine learning detects subtle changes in customer purchasing patterns — promotional response, price sensitivity, channel switching — and incorporates them automatically.
About the Modernizing Retail Event
Modernizing Retail was an executive event series dedicated to helping retail supply chain leaders navigate the intersection of AI adoption, pricing volatility, and inventory visibility. Produced in partnership with ToolsGroup, Spinnaker SCA, and Planalytics, the event brought together senior practitioners to share actionable strategies for building more resilient, responsive, and profitable retail supply chains.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Modernizing Retail event?
Modernizing Retail was an executive event series focused on retail supply chain excellence in the age of AI, pricing volatility, and visibility challenges. The event was produced in partnership with ToolsGroup, Spinnaker SCA, and Planalytics. This on-demand session features the standout presentation from the event, delivered by Jeanette Barlow, Chief Product Officer at ToolsGroup.
What does modern inventory optimization mean in retail?
Modern inventory optimization in retail refers to the use of AI-driven, probabilistic planning methods to determine the right inventory levels at every location in a distribution network — balancing service level targets against working capital constraints. Unlike traditional coverage-period or min-max approaches, modern optimization models the full range of demand uncertainty at the SKU-location level and automatically adjusts safety stock, replenishment triggers, and allocation decisions to maintain target availability with minimum inventory investment.
How does ToolsGroup approach retail inventory optimization?
ToolsGroup uses a probabilistic forecasting engine that models a full probability distribution of demand for every SKU and location, rather than generating a single-point forecast. This distribution is used to set optimal safety stock levels and trigger automated replenishment orders that maintain target service levels under demand uncertainty. The platform integrates inventory optimization with demand sensing, pricing optimization, and S&OP to ensure that inventory, pricing, and replenishment decisions are made in a connected, coordinated way.
Who is Jeanette Barlow?
Jeanette Barlow is the Chief Product Officer at ToolsGroup, responsible for the product strategy and roadmap of ToolsGroup's AI-powered supply chain planning platform. In this session, she presents ToolsGroup's perspective on modern inventory optimization, AI-driven pricing, and the retail visibility gap — drawing on ToolsGroup's experience with over 400 enterprise customers across retail, manufacturing, and distribution.
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