AlixPartners Launches AI Profit Engine to Help Retailers Accurately Forecast Demand and Optimize Pricing, Inventory, and Marketing

New ML-Powered Capability Can Help Retailers Grow Profitable Sales

NEW YORK (April 7, 2025) - AlixPartners, the global consulting firm, today announced the launch of a new AI engine that powers profitability for retailers. The AI Profit Engine integrates data from hundreds of internal and external sources to accurately forecast customer demand, enabling retailers with machine learning–powered capabilities to optimize pricing and promotion, inventory and assortment, and marketing strategies to achieve profitable sales growth.

“Retailers have historically relied on rigid, top-down forecasts that struggle to adapt to shifting customer trends and operational realities—making it difficult to model scenarios or align financial goals with actual demand.” said John Samuel, Partner and Managing Director, AlixPartners. “AI now has remarkable power to solve these challenges, and we developed our proprietary AI Profit Engine to incorporate and analyze a vast range of data inputs in a single application, so retailers can accurately and efficiently predict demand and achieve their business strategies.”

Traditional retail forecasting has often failed to accurately predict the two most crucial success factors: the number of customers who will shop at a retailer and how much they will spend. AlixPartners’ AI Profit Engine takes all the standard demand forecasting data points and combines them with additional information—such as pricing strategies, marketing investments, inventory availability, competitive pricing, and macroeconomic conditions—to help retailers accurately predict future customer counts, spend and, ultimately, revenue. 

AlixPartners’ AI Profit Engine helps retailers understand which customer value drivers really matter, how they can improve them for maximum impact and which financial planning scenarios will help them achieve their growth targets. The tool structures “what-if” analyses to help identify the most important levers decision makers can pull across marketing, assortment, and pricing to ensure every dollar invested delivers maximum business impact.

“Our AI Profit Engine is a game-changer for our clients that can help them unlock growth, improve margins and compete with confidence in a market facing further uncertainty due to the tariff crisis,” said Sonia Lapinsky, Partner and Managing Director and Leader of Fashion Retail at AlixPartners. “Tariffs will impact the entire business – starting with cost and margin, price to consumers, and pricing strategy. The tool is designed to look across all aspects of the business to help solve these challenges, when scenario planning is needed now more than ever.

AlixPartners AI Profit Engine powers decision making across:

• Pricing and promotions: Addresses all aspects of pricing by aligning the strategy and ensuring price setting and execution maximize their intended impact.
• Assortment and inventory: Links assortment to a customer plan; detailed segmentation shapes inventory buys and allocation across retail stores and e-commerce.
• Marketing and loyalty: Establishes optimal spend level, channel mix, targeting and segmentation to maximize effectiveness, customer lifetime value and profitability.

About AlixPartners
AlixPartners is a results-driven global consulting firm that specializes in helping businesses successfully capitalize on opportunity and address critical challenges. Our clients include companies, corporate boards, law firms, investment banks, private equity firms, and others. Founded in 1981, AlixPartners is headquartered in New York and has offices in more than 20 cities around the world. For more information, visit https://www.alixpartners.com.

Contact:

Ed Canaday
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