Blue Yonder has announced new retail innovations as part of its ‘Cognitive Solutions’ portfolio, designed to help hardlines and softlines retailers move from insight to action with agentic AI and connected retail decisioning. The latest enhancements create tighter alignment across forecasting, inventory planning, fulfilment, customer service and returns on the Blue Yonder Platform. Retailers can now respond faster to changing demand, improve inventory productivity and recover more value across the retail lifecycle. Rather than optimising individual retail functions in isolation, Blue Yonder connects decisions across planning and execution, so what a retailer learns about demand shapes both how they fulfil and how they manage returns.
“Many retailers can already see what’s happening. The hard part is acting on it before the moment passes,” said Gurdip Singh, chief product officer at Blue Yonder.
“With this release, we’re putting agentic AI into the flow of retail decisions. Forecasting, inventory, fulfilment and returns start working as one system instead of a chain of handoffs. That’s how you turn insight into action at the speed retail demands, with the precision to protect margins while you improve the customer experience.”
Smarter fulfilment and inventory visibility
Poor availability is expensive. Out-of-stocks cost retailers roughly $1.2 trillion a year in lost sales. The release adds predictive fulfilment intelligence and inventory network visibility in Order Management. This helps teams improve fill rates, service levels and fulfilment efficiency by identifying risks, bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities across inventory, sourcing, fulfilment and network operations. For retailers, that means better availability, fewer missed promises and smarter fulfilment decisions across stores, distribution centres and digital channels.
Unified workspace for service and selling
A new unified customer service and assisted selling workspace streamlines customer identification, product discovery, inventory visibility, pricing, fulfilment options, payment capture and order management. Customer service and store teams can respond faster, improve conversion and resolve issues with better context.
Recovering more value from returns
Returns are among retail’s costliest problems. U.S. consumers were expected to return nearly $850 billion in merchandise in 2025, about 15.8% of sales, according to the National Retail Federation. The new functionality includes:
Personalised returns experiences
Customer-specific returns policies
Configurable store credit strategies
Returns order receiving and receipt control
Smart Disposition and configuration
Test and Grade workflows
Unit-level simulation of disposition outcomes
Together, these capabilities target the same problems: reduce returns leakage, improve resale and recovery, cut fraud risk and keep shoppers satisfied. With Blue Yonder Returns Management, retailers move returned items back to sellable stock about 25% faster on average, improving in-stock levels and even reducing overall inventory levels.
“For most retailers, a return is a cost to absorb. I’d argue it’s a chance to reimagine the customer experience, save the sale and optimise inventory,” Singh said. “Now, the system doesn’t just initiate and process the return. It recommends the best decision for that item and allows users to act on it, from routing to receipt to resale. That’s an agent that does the work and helps recover more margin without adding headcount.”
AI-guided workflows
Blue Yonder enhances Orchestrator as the unified interaction and orchestration layer for workflows, insights, AI-powered guidance and actions. A new navigation experience combines traditional navigation with a prompt-driven, AI-first experience, so people move from decision to action faster across planning, execution and network operations.
