Whether you run a single store or a multi-location retail operation, the challenges are the same. Stock you cannot fully see, margin that erodes between the buy and the sell, and customer insight scattered across platforms you do not own.
A bespoke AI platform connects your stock, your trading performance, your supplier relationships and your customer data in one place. Owned by you, running on private infrastructure, with a website built in.
Retail margin lives and dies on stock turn. Dead stock is cash locked in a warehouse. Most retailers find out what is not moving at stocktake or month end. Your platform tracks stock velocity in real time across every location. Cortex flags slow movers before they become markdowns and identifies the reorder patterns that keep your best lines available.
Most retailers report a shrinkage number. Almost none can break it down accurately by cause. Your platform cross-references goods received against invoices, tracks stock movements and flags variances at the point they happen rather than at stocktake. Cortex builds the audit trail that turns shrinkage from an accepted cost into an accountable one.
Payment terms negotiated over years. Supplier performance history. Who to call when there is a problem. The deals that never made it into a contract. Every supplier, every contact, every conversation, every agreed term lives in your platform. Cortex knows your supplier performance history better than your buyers do.
Ecommerce platform here. EPOS there. Loyalty somewhere else. The customer has no idea you cannot see their full picture. You should be able to. Your platform creates a single customer record across every touchpoint. Every purchase, every return, every contact. Cortex knows your best customers, your at-risk customers and what it would take to bring back the ones who have gone quiet.
Sales by category pulled from one system. Stock positions from another. Online versus in-store reconciled manually. The report lands two days after the trading week ends. Your platform produces a live trading dashboard automatically. Every metric. Every channel. Every location. Updated continuously, not weekly.
Promotional effectiveness tracked retrospectively if at all. Pricing decisions made without a clear view of margin impact. Your platform tracks promotional performance in real time, models margin impact before you commit and flags when a promotion is cannibalising full-price sales rather than generating new ones.
Stock levels, stock velocity and reorder triggers across every location and every channel. Dead stock flagged before it becomes a markdown decision. Supplier deliveries matched against purchase orders automatically. Cortex knows your fastest and slowest movers and tells you before a gap becomes a stockout.
Sales, margin, average transaction value and conversion tracked in real time across physical stores and ecommerce. Cortex surfaces which locations, which categories and which products are trading ahead or behind. Your trading meeting stops being a retrospective and starts being a decision-making session.
Every supplier, every contact, every negotiated term, every performance score. Payment terms, delivery compliance, quality rejection rates and pricing benchmarks all tracked automatically. Ask Cortex who your most reliable supplier for own-brand gifting is and it gives you a ranked answer based on actual track record.
A unified customer record built from every touchpoint including in-store, online, returns, loyalty, contact history. Cortex identifies your highest-value customers, your most at-risk churners and which lapsed customers are worth targeting. Your marketing stops guessing and starts knowing.
Gross margin tracked by product, by category, by location and by channel in real time. Promotional impact modelled before launch. Mark-down decisions informed by actual stock velocity, not guesswork. Your finance director stops producing reports and starts making decisions.
A fully built website managed from inside your platform. Product pages, lookbooks, brand content, store finder, loyalty sign-up. Cortex generates product descriptions and seasonal content in your brand voice. SEO and GEO built in from day one. No agency. No monthly platform fee.
Cortex knows your stock position, your trading performance, your supplier relationships and your customer data. Ask it anything. From Christmas stock risk to which buyer's relationships need documenting before they leave.
"It answers like a trading director who has read every report, attended every meeting and forgotten nothing."
Every director takes two minutes on the last Friday of the month. The brain collates their updates, cross-references them against everything it knows about the business, and produces the board pack. Then it adds its own report: an independent analysis no director wrote, with no political considerations, that flags what the board needs to act on before the meeting starts.
Christmas trading ahead overall but physical stores softening. Online strong. Three new store openings on track for Q1. Supplier negotiations for spring range completing this month.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:38Womenswear underperforming in outerwear. Gifting sets risk of overstock. Online conversion up 12%. Click and collect now 28% of online orders. Two key buyers leaving end of month.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:42Manchester warehouse at 94% capacity. Shrinkage running at 1.8% versus 1.4% target. Three stores flagged for CCTV upgrade. New EPOS rollout on track for February.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:46Gross margin at 48.2% versus 49.1% budget. Promotional spend 12% over plan. Working capital tight due to early stock build. Bank covenant review next month.
SUBMITTED · FRIDAY 16:50The following analysis was prepared by Cortex from the director updates above, combined with live platform data. It is independent of any director's submission and has been prepared without prior sight of the agenda.
Gifting sets are tracking to a significant overstock position in January. At current rate of sale you will exit the season with approximately £180,000 of cost value in gifting inventory. A targeted pre-Christmas promotion on the three slowest lines would cost approximately £22,000 in margin but avoid a January clearance that could cost three times that. This needs a decision this week not next month.
Gross margin is 0.9 points below budget. The gap is not in buying initial margins are on plan. It is in promotional spend which is running 12% over plan. Three promotions this quarter have had a negative ROI when incremental sales are stripped out. The board should agree a promotional effectiveness threshold before the Christmas period and stick to it.
Online is performing strongly and click and collect adoption is ahead of target. This is structural shift not a blip. The case for the new fulfilment centre investment is stronger than it was six months ago. The board should consider whether the capital allocation originally planned for two physical store refits in Q2 would generate better returns redirected to online fulfilment capability.
Two buying team departures in the same month represents a significant knowledge risk. Based on the supplier relationship data in the platform, Sarah holds seven relationships with non-standard terms that are not formally documented. Recommend a structured knowledge transfer process before both departures and an urgent review of any undocumented commercial arrangements.
Cortex has no politics, no relationships to protect and no agenda. It tells the board what the data says, not what anyone wanted it to say.
It has read every director's update and cross-referenced it against live platform data before it writes a word. No human could do that in 40 seconds.
Every claim references its source. The board can interrogate any finding and trace it back to the underlying data, transaction or record.
Runs under the Sheriff: cites sources, flags uncertainty, never invents figures and always distinguishes between what the data shows and what it recommends.
A 30 minute call. No deck, no pressure, no junior sales rep. You talk, we listen, and you leave with a straight answer on whether a brain makes sense for your business.