— Marc Weiss, CEO, Management One
AI is an engine. Humans provide wisdom.
I believe that, and I believe it takes two things to be true for it to work. First, the people need experience, skill, and knowledge. Second, the AI needs data that is accurate and matches the use cases it is called on to answer. Take away either one and you have a fast engine with nobody steering and no road map.
Every retailer I talk to is hearing the same thing right now: AI is going to change the business. Some of them are excited. More of them are tired of hearing it. Both reactions make sense. General AI can analyze sales data and make assumptions. That part is real. What it will not tell you is whether those assumptions are right or wrong for a store like yours in a season like this one, because it has never seen data from a thousand stores like yours. And it will not accurately tell you whether the right move is to cancel, mark down, or hold, because it has never had to live with the answer.
That is the gap. AI is faster than any of us at reading the numbers and surfacing the pattern. Deciding what the pattern means, and what to do about it, takes two things a general AI tool does not have: data from retailers like you, and a person who has stood in the stockroom and made the call. The retailers who come out ahead will not be the ones who hand the decisions to the machine, and they will not be the ones who refuse to use it. They will be the ones who put the engine in the hands of people who know the road.
Let me start with the people, because at M1 that is where everything starts.
Forty years of people who have done the work
Our planning was built and architected by our co-founder over 40 years. He planned millions of classes himself. Then he taught and trained an army of people who are out there today doing this work for our community. That is not a methodology someone wrote in a conference room. It was learned in stores, with real inventory, through real recessions.
Our planning staff carries that forward. Every one of them has a minimum of 15 years of planning experience. Together they have planned hundreds of thousands of classes for M1 and tens of billions of dollars of independent retail sales, across dozens of verticals. When one of them looks at a plan and says “that does not look right,” they are drawing on years of seeing what happens next.
Our coaches were business owners, buyers, and great merchants. They worked for small companies and large ones. They all chose the same mission: deliver financial security to their clients so those clients can thrive in ANY economy.
Leaders who grew up as merchants
Today we have three Directors who come from retail families and who worked and grew up as merchants.
Mike Baranov is our new Director of Coaching, Content, and Education. Mike was GMM and CEO of an 11-store shoe chain with e-commerce and Amazon experience. He led that company successfully and spent 25 years building relationships, building people, and growing the business through recession, good times, and Covid. He knows what our clients are living through because he lived it, and he is the right person to make sure every coach and every piece of content we deliver is built on that kind of experience.
Adam Hambleton grew up in the surf business, and his family is still part of it today. He managed the rapid growth of e-commerce and was an early pioneer in that world. For the last five years he has headed our planning and development team, and he and his team are building the future of what information will look like for independent retailers. Adam has led our course in AI so that it becomes the connective tissue for all of our processes.
Dane Cohen is our Director of Business Development. Dane grew up in an iconic family business on Long Island. He is a merchant and a manager, and he knows the DNA of a family business because he grew up in one of the best. Today he connects with retailers and retail audiences around the country, and when he talks with an independent owner, he is talking with someone who understands what it means to carry a family name over the door.
These three do not manage retail from a distance. They have lived the cash flow, the buying calendar, and the Monday morning after a bad weekend.
Why does the data matter just as much
Experience alone does not scale, and an engine without the right fuel does not perform. That is where Ask Indie comes in.
Ask Indie is built on our proprietary data on independent specialty retailers, gathered over decades and updated daily. It is not trained on the whole internet. It is trained on what actually happens in stores like yours. General AI will give you a confident answer. Ask Indie gives you an answer grounded in how independent retailers like you have performed, in your class, in your season, in your economy. Accurate data that matches the question being asked is what turns AI from interesting into useful.
Where the human fits
AI is the engine that leads our future, and it is becoming the connective tissue for everything we do. But it always comes with human governance. As we build toward more automated planning, every step has a person with the judgment to say yes, no, or “not like that.” AI can ingest the data, run the numbers, and surface the trend faster than any of us. A human who has seen it before decides what to do with it.
That is what human governance means to us. Not a person slowing the machine down, but a person who knows where the machine should be going.
The engine is getting more powerful every month. Our job is to make sure the people steering it are the best in the business.
Onwards and Upwards,
Marc Weiss
Co-founder and CEO
Management One
|
Pass It Along
Know another retailer who'd want this in their inbox?
We send a read like this regularly including a variety of topics indie retailers like you care about: what we're seeing across the community, what's working, what's not, and what to do about it. Forward this post, or sign up below to get it straight from us.
|