Hyperautomation in Retail: Top 10 Use Cases & Benefits in 2024

Retail is one of the top industries that leverage RPA and AI adoption of retail businesses has increased by 27% during the pandemic. As a top technology trend for 2022¹, hyperautomation is the next step in enterprise automation for retailers.

In this article, we’ll explore what hyperautomation means for retailers, its top use cases, and how retailers can get started with their hyperautomation initiative.

Why is hyperautomation important for the retail industry?

Hyperautomation is a digital transformation strategy in which businesses automate as many business processes as possible while digitally augmenting the ones that require human input. As Gartner reports, hyperautomation is rapidly becoming a necessity rather than an option for businesses.

A hyperautomation initiative is also necessary for retailers because of the specific challenges of the retail industry:

• Customers demand a personalized retail experience. 80%

Hyperautomation can help retailers deal with these challenges by improving business agility through intelligent technologies.

What are the use cases of hyperautomation in retail?

We have explored the use cases of individual hyperautomation technologies in retail, such as:

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Intelligent automation
• Robotic process automation (RPA)
• Computer vision
• Chatbots
• Digital twins
• Internet of things (IoT)

Hyperautomation combines these technologies for end-to-end process automation. Use cases include:

Customer services

Online shoppers say that the factors that make them choose a specific brand to shop for are:

• The ability to find what they want quickly and easily (58%)
• Quality customer service (44%)
• Speedy and simple checkouts (42%)

Hyperautomation can help retailers improve customer experience in all these factors:

1. Recommendation engines that leverage customer data and AI models can assist shoppers in discovering products that match their preferences.
2. Intent classification models can leverage users’ purchasing intent data to help retailers predict customer behavior better.
3. Bots with conversational AI capabilities can answer FAQs, collect customer feedback, and assist human customer reps during their customer interactions.
4. Checkout-free systems that leverage computer vision, IoT sensors, and smart carts allow customers in physical stores to grab what they want without waiting at checkout.
5. Digital twins of stores can be used to optimize the layout of the physical store and improve the customer journey.

Inventory management

Nearly half² of consumers view out-of-stock items as a negative shopping experience and 32%³ of them would stop doing business with a brand they loved after a single bad experience. 

Hyperautomation technologies can help retailers ensure effective inventory management:

6. Inventory optimization: By leveraging historical data, AI and ML models can predict the optimum amount of inventory for different locations and at different times of the year.
7. Smart shelves with IoT sensors can track the inventory levels of items placed on them, alerting inventory teams when a product’s stock level falls below a certain level.
8. Inventory robots with computer vision capability can track inventory levels and products in real time.

9. Invoice automation

Processing an invoice manually costs around 10$⁴ and takes 25 days on average, with numerous repetitive and error-prone tasks such as:

• Extracting relevant information,
• Matching up the billed amount and the amount on purchase orders,
• Resolving any discrepancy in the amounts charged,
• Entering data into company systems.

Hyperautomation technologies can help retailers automate end-to-end invoice processing:

• RPA bots can monitor incoming invoices,
• OCR and NLP tools help extract relevant data from invoices in different formats,
• Intelligent bots can cross-check extracted information against purchase orders and other criteria,
• Intelligent automation bots can also record relevant information extracted from invoices to company systems.

Check our article on invoice automation for more.

10. Legacy integration

Replacing a legacy system can be a challenge for retailers as many essential business operations rely on them. However, these systems can create compatibility issues with modern cloud software and disrupt hyperautomation initiatives.

Hyperautomation technologies can help retailers integrate these legacy systems with modern software without spending resources on developing specialized integration solutions. For instance, intelligent bots with NLP and computer vision capabilities can:

• Access to different types of software and interact with the user interface like a human employee,
• Read the screens of applications and understand  the context,
• Extract and migrate data between different software.

How to get started?

The success of a hyperautomation initiative depends on a coordinated and company-wide effort that involves:

• Aligning the initiative with your overall business strategy,
• Establishing a cross-functional automation center of excellence,
• Leveraging process intelligence,
• Developing a change management strategy to ensure employee engagement.

Learn more about these steps in our article on intelligent automation strategy.

Further reading

• Top 4 Trends in Enterprise Hyperautomation
• Top 12 Hyperautomation Use Cases & Examples

If you have questions about hyperautomation in the retail industry, we can help:

External Links

• 1. “2023 Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends: Detailed Guide (eBook).” Gartner. Retrieved 16 November 2022.
• 2. “Omnichannel Retail: The Business Value | Oracle Retail.” Oracle. Retrieved 16 November 2022.
• 3. “Customer experience is everything.” PwC. Retrieved 16 November 2022.
• 4. “What Is Invoice Processing?” NetSuite, 15 September 2020. Accessed 16 November 2022.