Table of Contents
AI is swiftly transforming retail distribution, reshaping how sales teams plan visits, engage with customers, and execute sales strategies. Traditionally, sales and distribution have relied on manual decision-making, intuition, and fragmented data sources.
However, brands today are asking how they can utilize AI in retail distribution, at every step from visit planning to SKU recommendations and real-time customer insights.
While AI has been a hot topic in the industry, its application in retail distribution often leans toward generic, gimmick-driven implementations.
At BeatRoute, we take a different approach. As frontrunners in AI innovation within our industry, we have woven advanced AI capabilities into our proprietary Goal-Driven Sales Tech, delivering real, measurable outcomes.
Operational AI and Conversational AI have been cornerstones of our AI advancements so far. We understand that many of our customers are still working on data readiness or setting up future-proof enterprise architectures. That’s why we recommend a long-term AI strategy while simultaneously enabling the most viable first and second AI projects.
This article explores the specific challenges AI addresses in retail distribution, the detailed benefits of AI-driven sales execution, and our understanding of the future trends that will shape AI adoption in this space.
The Key Challenges AI is Solving in Retail Distribution
Retail distribution teams often face inefficiencies that hold back their productivity and sales performance. After extensive research, we’ve identified six key use cases for AI that can transform retail distribution which are as follows:
- Prioritising Store Visits Effectively: Sales reps often lack clear direction on which stores to visit first, leading to sub-optimal territory coverage and inefficient time utilisation. This is applicable for industries such as Consumer Appliances, Building Materials, Pharmaceuticals, Auto-ancillaries and others where sales reps don’t follow a fixed schedule. Even in the FMCG industry, territory managers don’t have fixed schedules and find it difficult to prioritise their own visits.
- Inconsistent In-Store Execution: Without real-time insights, reps struggle to determine the most important sales activities to focus on at each store, compromising productivity and sales impact.
- Lack of Real-Time Insights For Managers: Area managers find it difficult to detect issues like stock outs, compliance gaps, or underperforming stores and take corrective actions promptly.
- Inefficient SKU Recommendations Leading to Lost Sales: Sales reps rely on past experience or guesswork to pitch new products, which often results in missed cross-selling opportunities and inefficient stock movement.
- Overwhelming Data Without Actionable Insights: Sales teams receive vast amounts of data but lack AI-driven analytics to extract meaningful, actionable intelligence to make high impact interventions.
- Lack of AI-driven Goal Setting for Teams and Individuals: Traditional sales targets are often set using static rules, without optimisation based on AI insights, leading to inefficiencies in target planning as well as goal achievement.
How AI is Transforming Retail Distribution
AI-driven solutions address these challenges by providing automated decision-making capabilities, intelligent recommendations, and real-time insights that empower sales teams to optimise execution.
| Visit Planning | BeatRoute’s Help Me Plan dynamically prioritises store visits based on revenue potential, sales trends, and business impact. |
| Task Execution | BeatRoute’s Task Recommendations generate customised action plans for sales reps, ensuring store-level efficiency. |
| Sales Insights | BeatRoute’s Customer Insights provide intelligent insights on customers, enabling data-backed decision-making. |
| Cross-Selling | Order Recommendation leverages AI to suggest the best SKUs for each store. |
| Problem-Solving | Conversational AI offers real-time insights and recommendations to field teams and managers with a ChatGPT-like interface. |
| Goal-Setting | AI-based Target Setting is designed to adjust goals for retailers, distributors, teams and individuals based on past trends and market conditions. |
Traditional Sales Execution vs AI Enabled Execution
On their own, traditional sales execution methods are becoming increasingly outdated, relying on guesswork and manual processes. In contrast, AI introduces real-time insights, and precision to bolster traditional approaches. The comparison table below highlights these differences side by side.
| Feature | Traditional Methods | AI Assisted Approach |
| Visit Planning | Manual, intuition-based | AI-optimised based on data-driven impact |
| Task Execution | Generic, checklist-based | Personalised, intelligent recommendations |
| Data Analysis | Delayed, spreadsheet-based | Real-time, AI-powered insights |
| SKU Recommendations | One-size-fits-all | AI-driven, store-specific suggestions |
| Managerial Decisions | Reactive, based on periodic audits | AI-driven, proactive intervention |
| Goal-Setting | Static, rigid targets | AI-driven, adaptable, intelligent goal-setting |
Overcoming AI Adoption Challenges in Retail Distribution
Despite AI’s potential benefits, brands often encounter challenges when integrating AI into their retail distribution.
| Challenge | Issues Faced | AI-Driven Solution |
| Data Silos & Unstructured Data | Brands’ data is fragmented across ERP, DMS, SFA tools and HR systems, creating inconsistencies. Sales data itself is sometimes divided across separate SFAs for different channels, while distributor transactions remain in disconnected DMS platforms. This lack of integration leads to inefficiencies and inaccurate reporting. | Investing in unified platforms like BeatRoute enables seamless data integration, ensuring a single source of truth. Additionally, data lakes help consolidate and clean data for AI-driven analytics. |
| Fear of Disrupting Existing Processes | Businesses worry that AI-driven automation will replace their current workflows and disrupt operational stability. | AI should enhance existing processes rather than replace them, complementing human decision-making with data-driven intelligence. |
| AI Models Not Aligned with Business-Specific Needs | Generic AI models often fail to account for industry-specific nuances, leading to inaccurate or irrelevant recommendations. | AI should be fine-tuned to align with specific business objectives, ensuring brand-customized applications that drive measurable outcomes. |
| AI Models Work on Generic Data | AI models are trained on generic sales data, lacking context of unique business needs of each brand. | AI models should incorporate industry specific patterns, as well as be trainable on a brand’s own data. |
Impact of AI for Retail Brands
Being able to measure and justify the ROI of brands’ AI investments by delivering measurable sales uplift is a key tenet of our AI worldview. We have measured the impact of our AI features for customers under 2 broad categories:
Direct Impact of AI Features
- 4.3% Sales Uplift through Operational AI
- 5.3% Sales Uplift through Conversational AI & Analytics
Indirect Impact by Embedding AI in GDST
- 12.6% Sales Uplift through Goal-Driven Sales Tech (GDST) for Sales Team
- 5.2% Sales Uplift through Goal-Driven Sales Tech (GDST) for Customers
We will continue to assess the sales uplift delivered by AI as we release more AI features.
Conclusion
Generic AI solutions are quickly becoming outdated. Today, brands need AI-led RTM strategies to address their unique challenges and goals. Businesses that embrace AI will not only stay ahead, but will thrive in an increasingly intelligence-driven market.
That’s where BeatRoute stands out, offering smarter visit planning, real-time insights, and AI-driven goal setting to bridge the gaps in traditional sales execution. With AI features like Conversational AI (CuesBot), we’ve already amplified sales by 5.3%, along with a 4.3% increase through Operational AI features such as order recommendations, visit planning, task recommendations, and customer insights.
Book a demo to discover how BeatRoute’s AI capabilities can drive measurable sales growth for your business.
About the Author
Latest Insights & Articles
Here are the most impactful articles, platform updates, ebooks and reports for you.
