Sarah Tyler

After fifteen years managing trade promotion programs for a multinational CPG company, I thought I had seen every challenge the industry could throw at me. Late nights reconciling promotion ROI spreadsheets, tense category review meetings where we defended our trade spend allocation decisions with incomplete data, and the perpetual struggle to forecast promotional lift across hundreds of SKUs and dozens of retail partners. Then our executive team mandated a digital transformation initiative, and my world changed completely. What I learned implementing advanced cloud-based AI systems to manage our trade promotion operations fundamentally altered not just how we work, but what we believed was possible in promotion effectiveness analytics. The journey began when our VP of Sales challenged us to improve our promotional cadence decision-making by thirty percent within eighteen months. Traditional business intelligence tools were not going to cut it. We needed something that could process re...

Three years ago, our merchandising team watched helplessly as thousands of units of a trending denim style sat in distribution centers while our top-selling floral prints sold out within days. We had the wrong inventory in the wrong places at the wrong time. The markdowns cost us nearly 40% of our gross margin that quarter, and our GMROI plummeted. That painful season taught us something critical: human intuition alone, no matter how experienced, cannot process the volume and velocity of signals that drive customer demand in modern fashion retail. We needed a fundamental shift in how we approached demand forecasting, and that shift came through artificial intelligence. The journey to implementing AI-Driven Demand Forecasting transformed not just our inventory performance but our entire approach to merchandising strategy. What started as a pilot program to reduce overstock became a comprehensive reimagining of how we plan assortments, manage weeks of supply, and execute in-season refor...