Blue Yonder, the AI company for supply chain, today 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, fulfillment, 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 optimizing individual retail functions in isolation, Blue Yonder connects decisions across planning and execution, so what a retailer learns about demand shapes both how they fulfill 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, fulfillment 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.”
What analysts are saying
“Fulfillment networks are getting more complex, and customers aren’t waiting for retailers to catch up,” said Ananda Chakravarty, VP Research, Retail, IDC. “Winning retailers are connecting inventory visibility, order management, returns, warehouse and transportation into one AI-driven decision engine, not five different engagement platforms. That’s the difference between fast, profitable fulfillment and margin bleed. There’s no more room for disconnected execution.”
Smarter fulfillment and inventory visibility
Poor availability is expensive. Out-of-stocks cost retailers roughly $1.2 trillion a year in lost sales, according to IHL Group. The release adds predictive fulfillment intelligence and inventory network visibility in Order Management. This helps teams improve fill rates, service levels and fulfillment efficiency by identifying risks, bottlenecks and optimization opportunities across inventory, sourcing, fulfillment and network operations. For retailers, that means better availability, fewer missed promises and smarter fulfillment decisions across stores, distribution centers 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, fulfillment 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. Blue Yonder brings new omni-inventory capabilities across online, warehouse and store returns. This new functionality includes:
- Personalized 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 optimize 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 with Orchestrator
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.
More updates across planning and forecasting
The release includes several other updates:
- Assortment Planning adds assortment strategy and scoring guidance, demand explainability, in-season sales and inventory planning, and placeholder store workflows.
- Allocation and Replenishment adds returns projections, enhanced multichannel forecasting and automated supply distribution when inventory arrives at the distribution center.
- Space Planning Solution adds closed-loop planogram execution and compliance capabilities that connect planning to in-store implementation, validate execution against actual shelf conditions, and continuously improve planograms through feedback to planners.
Together, the updates give retailers one connected system to plan, decide and act on with speed and precision. The enhancements are available now as part of Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions.
Additional Resources:
- Learn more about Blue Yonder’s 26.2 release here
- Learn more about Blue Yonder’s retail innovations here
- Learn more about Blue Yonder’s supply chain management solutions here
About Blue Yonder
Blue Yonder is the AI company for supply chain. As the world leader in end-to-end digital supply chain transformation, Blue Yonder offers a unified, AI-driven platform and multi-tier network that empowers businesses to operate sustainably, scale profitably, and delight their customers—all at machine speed. A pioneer in applying AI solutions to the most complicated supply chain challenges, Blue Yonder’s modern innovations and unmatched industry expertise help more than 3,000 retailers, manufacturers, and logistics service providers confidently navigate supply chain complexity and disruption. blueyonder.com
“Blue Yonder” is a trademark or registered trademark of Blue Yonder Group, Inc. Any trade, product or service name referenced in this document using the name “Blue Yonder” is a trademark and/or property of Blue Yonder Group, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of the companies with which they are associated.
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