Supercharging Category Performance with AI Solutions for Merchants
The intuitive, flexible merchant analytics applications in Merch AI by BCG X provide insights that decode one of retailers’ fundamental challenges: how to offer customers the right products in the right stores at the right cost. Merch AI provides the infrastructure, algorithms, and workflows that help retailers build the customer-centric assortments and cost advantage they need in order to succeed.

About Merch AI by BCG X
For retailers, having enough data on merchandising options isn’t the problem; it’s gleaning the critical insights hiding inside internal and external data—insights needed to optimize decisions about products, suppliers, shelf space, and stores. An integral element of our larger Retail AI offering, Merch AI’s suite of nine automated merchant applications helps retailers uncover insights that would otherwise remain hidden, achieving deeper customer satisfaction, greater cost advantage, and, ultimately, increased topline growth and margin.
Merch AI brings more than just advanced algorithms and applications to the table. Our team of over 50 BCG X engineers partners with BCG consultants to offer deep retail expertise, a customized and scalable approach, and best-in-class implementation and change management. Retailers can select the tailored solutions most relevant to their specific starting point and business needs to realize value quickly—or implement the full suite of merchant analytics applications as part of a broader AI transformation initiative.
Harnessing Data and AI Solutions to Extract Maximum Value
Data Foundations
Active Cost Management
Customer-Centric Assortment
Store Optimization
Always-On Diagnostics

Enhancing Merchant Process Automation with AI
Built on a flexible cloud platform, Merch AI’s merchant analytics applications deeper insights at a larger scale in less time. The applications are highly customizable, with our engineering and Merch AI experts ensuring seamless integration into existing environments. Retailers can select the relevant use cases and leverage tailor-made algorithms and workflows to automate key analyses, reduce time spent on manual tasks, and enhance merchant skills and capabilities to drive sustained impact and long-term success.

Category Performance
A cloud-based app with scalable dead net profit (DNP) database and visualization tools analyzes, models, and prioritizes categories, builds category fact sets, creates assortment scenarios, and quantifies performance gaps—all to support client and vendor discussions.

Commodity Opportunity
Commodity Opportunity tracks over 20,000 food and non-food commodities, identifying trends, price fluctuations, and cost increases. It generates product “recipes” and fact packs for vendor discussions, uncovering high-value opportunities and running “what if” scenarios to proactively or reactively manage costs.

Item Attribution
This AI solution for merchants is used to analyze internal and external data and generate consistent descriptions of a retailer’s entire product catalog. Retailers can use the data-based tags to create pricing structures, plan how to introduce new products by region or market, and analyze competitors’ assortments.

Customer Decision Tree
Retailers can identify the best moves to make when addressing customer needs with this automated merchant analytics app, assessing the products that customers buy and their purchasing preferences, all to identify critical overlaps or gaps in assortment.

Assortment Optimization
Taking the data produced by Customer Decision Tree a step further, this app helps merchandisers translate customer buying behaviors into recommendations for optimizing assortment and shelf space for specific store clusters, trading off micro and macro space considerations.

Supplier Hub
Using this web-based merchant analytics application, retailers can offer subscription access to data on their business performance and other metrics—which suppliers can use to evaluate their own business. The white-label hub is secure and quick to launch with access to multiple data tiers.

Merchant Hub
Merchant Hub is a multipurpose productivity tool and merchandising information control center, keeping tabs on pricing, planning, and assortment while identifying performance drivers. Leveraging GenAI, the all-in-one hub also links to the Commodity Opportunity and Assortment Optimization apps.

Store Network
Built on an optimization algorithm, Store Network analyzes data from multiple predictive models and upstream inputs to determine a retailer’s best possible omni-channel real estate network, making cross-brand recommendations for sites to add, relocate, or close.

Macro Space Allocation
This machine learning-based application recommends the right space to allocate to every product category based on historical data, external demand, and business constraints. Retailers can generate multiple layouts simultaneously to evaluate options for layouts, configurations, and adjacent products.
Our Clients’ Success with Merch AI
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