Blue Yonder Transforms Retail Supply Chains With New AI-Driven Innovations for Unified Planning and Execution

Blue Yonder announced that it has released new AI-driven innovations across its end-to-end planning and execution solutions, enabling retailers to increase agility, optimize customer experiences and drive profitable growth.

“Increasing customer demands for speed, personalization and convenience are driving the need for connected, data-driven supply chain solutions that deliver speed and precision while protecting a company’s bottom line,” said Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder. “By leveraging AI-driven capabilities, unified decisioning and an intelligent multi-enterprise network, our latest innovations help retailers adapt to market volatility, optimize resources and deliver delightful customer experiences at scale.”

The latest enhancements come on the heels of the company’s launch of new AI-powered, platform-driven Cognitive Solutions in the summer of 2025. Recent innovations include:

Innovations in unified supply chain planning

Planning agents for speed and flexibility

Blue Yonder is transforming retail planning with machine learning (ML) and AI-driven capabilities that optimize inventory strategies, improve forecast accuracy and dynamically align plans with market changes and operational realities.

• Enhanced AI agents for Merchandise Financial Planning and Assortment Planning empower retailers to make faster, smarter decisions to identify profit risks and recommend actions, as well as build optimized assortments based on trend analysis. And a new mobile companion app for Allocation and Replenishment enables planners to review daily store orders, quickly adjust allocations and confirm quantities on-the-go for unmatched flexibility. As a result, planning teams are more effective, delivering better results that are less prone to human error, and with more time to focus on higher impact initiatives.
• The updated Inventory Ops Agent empowers forecasters, allocators and re-buyers to leverage AI to evaluate whether current inventory strategies are achieving desired business outcomes, while exploring suggestions for further gains. Additionally, the agent now facilitates updates to multi-sourcing setup using natural language prompts, boosting efficiency and elevating success.
• Shelf Ops Agent has been enhanced to enable micro-space planners to automate complex activities—from planogram edits to product substitutions—at-scale using natural language, all while delivering visibility into underlying performance and improving decision-making.

Real-time order and returns orchestration

With AI-powered orchestration delivering real-time inventory visibility, precise fulfillment and best-in-class returns across every omnichannel touchpoint, Blue Yonder is transforming order management and returns.

• Enhancements to sourcing simulator and rebalancer now enable order-driven demand planning across fulfillment nodes, helping retailers make better planning decisions and proactively redistribute orders across locations while improving ideal order placement and fill rates.
• Smart Disposition engine now includes new AI models to maximize revenue, predicting resale value across locations and routing returned inventory to the optimal place for margin recovery.
• Enhanced Order Management with native AI agents—including a new fulfillment agent that provides real-time inventory visibility and automated recommendations to resolve sourcing and fulfillment issues proactively, as well as a customer service agent that empowers customer-facing teams to manage inquiries, resolve order issues and deliver exceptional customer experiences effectively.

Over the 2025 Thanksgiving weekend, Blue Yonder surfaced inventory availability to its customers in as quickly as 10-12 milliseconds and estimated delivery dates for over 1.2 billion SKUs, driving improved conversion for retailers. Together, these innovations help retailers optimize margins—from click to purchase to return—and elevate the end-to-end customer experience.

Connected merchandising to meet store-specific requirements

Leveraging AI-based orchestration and recommendations, Blue Yonder Micro Space Planning enables retailers to create assortment-driven shelf and display plans that maximize product impact across every store.

• Planogram optimization: Utilizing Blue Yonder’s built-in ML engine, the solution uses rough-cut assortment data and changing, market-specific demand requirements to generate localized, store-level planograms at-scale, removing the need for store-specific templates, merchant intent or consumer preference rules.
• Planogram execution: A new mobile app empowers store associates to receive planograms on their phones, ensuring faster, more accurate planogram implementations that guarantee higher customer satisfaction and more consistent in-store experiences.
• Planogram compliance: Store associates can further use the mobile app to take an image of the new display and communicate it back to the planner, allowing for in-the-moment identification of variances from the planogram. This information is instantly available to management to take into consideration for future store-specific planograms.

Innovations in supply chain execution

Warehouse operations that sense, predict and flex to optimize for efficiency

Blue Yonder Warehouse Management Solution now helps soft-lines, grocery and general merchandise retailers to manage growing operational complexity with pull-based streaming that improves agility, maximizes capacity utilization, increases performance, and ensures continuous operations. The enhanced Warehouse Ops Agent provides explainable, actionable insights and pre-shift reviews to dynamically optimize resources and slotting plans to maximize throughput without disruption. When combined with Blue Yonder’s 3D load-building and transportation route and load optimization capabilities, retailers gain a distinctive competitive advantage. In the first 10 months of 2025 alone, Blue Yonder optimized over 23 million human tasks in warehouses.

Seamless and intelligent logistics at scale

Advancements in warehouse and transportation management enable retailers to streamline workflows, automate tasks and improve collaboration to deliver greater value across the end-to-end supply chain. The enhanced Logistics Ops Agent features a modern, persona-based UX that empowers teams to work more efficiently. It also includes expanded capabilities to proactively identify challenges such as unrouteable loads and offer resolutions such as backhaul opportunities to increase cost savings and delivery speed.

“By embedding AI across its end-to-end solutions, Blue Yonder enables retailers to unlock greater value and agility across their operations,” said Jordan Speer, Research Director, Worldwide Retail Product Sourcing, Fulfillment and Sustainability Strategies, IDC. “Through innovations that allow planning and execution to work essentially in tandem by letting AI uncover constraints, disruptions, accurate inventory counts, and so forth, Blue Yonder surfaces actionable intelligence for quick, optimal decisions that cut waste and cost while creating opportunity to serve the customer better while driving profitable growth.”

These innovations further strengthen Blue Yonder’s retail solutions which include the Blue Yonder Network, a multi-enterprise supply chain network that provides retailers access to over 172,000 global trading partners, and the Blue Yonder Platform to create an integrated, efficient, and responsive retail supply chain.

Blue Yonder will showcase its latest innovations at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show, Jan. 11-13, 2026, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. In addition to solution demos at the company’s booth #4239, other highlights at the show include:

• Big Ideas Session: Join Blue Yonder’s Big Ideas Session, “Smashing Retail Silos with AI-powered Network Transparency,” on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026, at 10:15am EST. Blue Yonder customers Tom Farrell, VP of merchandising systems and technologies at Fabletics, and Amit Kulkarni, VP of supply chain, merchandising & co-op brands tech at REI, will join Andrea Morgan-Vandome, chief innovation officer at Blue Yonder, to discuss how end-to-end visibility and collaboration and AI-driven insights are helping retailers achieve real results across planning and execution.
• Playoff Football Watch Party: Blue Yonder will host a watch party for the NFL playoffs on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026, from 6-9pm EST for supply chain and retail leaders. Sponsored by Microsoft and Hakkoda, this invite-only event will feature meet-and-greets with former XXXVI Super Bowl champion Drew Bledsoe and Super Bowl XLII champion Antonio Pierce.
• Deep Dive Conversation at NRF Rev: Join Blue Yonder at NRF Rev for a Deep Dive Conversation titled, “Return. Restock. Resell. How AI Turns Returns into Revenue-Ready Inventory,” on Sunday, Jan. 11 at 12pm EST. This session will explore how AI-powered solutions and an omni-inventory approach enable retailers to transform returns from a cost drain into a growth engine.