Built-in AI, not bolt-on: how we're approaching AI at DemandTec

Every software vendor is racing to add an AI assistant. It’s a good start, but it’s not the finish line. An assistant on top of today’s workflows helps you do the same work a little faster. The bigger opportunity is to change how the work gets done, and that’s what we’re building at DemandTec.

The bigger opportunity

When factories first adopted electricity, most simply swapped it in for the steam engine and left the workflow alone. Productivity took off only when manufacturers redesigned around it, with power built into every machine and every step. AI is following the same pattern, and leading retailers are already building prediction, decisions and autonomy into the flow of the work itself.

Promotion and trade planning is a clear example. For many of you, it still runs on spreadsheets, email and after-the-fact reporting. The price and promo lead at a large national retailer told us they manage 17 spreadsheets to plan roughly 500 promotions across five banners. A specialty retailer said the spreadsheet model “doesn’t scale at all.” If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

Summarizing those spreadsheets helps a little. Changing how the plan gets made helps a lot. Forecasts shape the plan as you build it, recommendations arrive ready for you to approve, routine decisions run by exception, and every outcome makes the next prediction better.

Where we’re taking Commercial Trade Intelligence™

We’re designing for the business change first. We start with the decisions and the way of working you’ll want in two years, then build AI into that. Every capability works across Plan, Fund, Execute and Reconcile, and follows one framework:

Three principles guide everything we ship:

What we bring

Our advantage is our science and our data. DemandTec already offers strong price forecasting and promotion optimization, and we’re extending that approach across trade and other revenue-management use cases. Our platform also connects Trade Performance (the funding behind promotions) with Revenue Optimization (pricing and promotion growth), so AI can follow a single event across both.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. A vendor changes deal terms after a promotion is built. An agent spots the change, and an insight shows what it does to the promotion’s plan and margin. You open a pre-filled scenario to respond, and the outcome flows back to the deal record. That’s what a connected platform makes possible.

How we earn your trust

Trust isn’t something we get to assume. We earn it, step by step. Our agents start out making suggestions, and you decide what happens next. As you get comfortable, they can take on small, pre-approved changes, and later work within limits you set, always with the ability to undo. You stay in charge of how far that goes and how fast.

You’ll also always be able to see what’s going on. Everything the AI shows, and everything your team does with it, is logged. Before any new model, supplier or data flow touches your data, we review it. And before you see any preview, we’ll agree with you on exactly what it covers.

Bolt-on saves minutes. Built-in changes decisions.

A bolt-on saves a few minutes. Built-in AI helps promotions hit the plan, grow the category and protect margin, at scale, and it keeps learning from every decision.

That’s the product we’re building, and we’d love to build it with you.

If you’d like to see where it’s headed, or talk through how your planning could change, get in touch with the DemandTec team. We’d be glad to hear from you.