How solo business owners use AI for stress-free inventory management

Steffy Lee Simms and Jen Podany use AI to help run their solo ventures.

Lila Lee, Matt Martian Williams for BI

For small, product-based businesses, managing inventory well is a matter of survival. Order too much, and you're drowning in carrying costs. Order too little and you lose sales, tank your rankings, and frustrate loyal customers.At the same time, understanding the ins and outs of inventory management is also a heavy lift, especially when you're a solopreneur running a business on your own."As a company, we're selling through our website, through Amazon, through QuickBooks to manage our wholesale accounts, we drop ship on Nordstrom: We've got all these different channels that we're trying to manage," Jen Podany, the founder of the ultraviolet and sun protection brand Bluestone Sunshields, told Business Insider. Lacking a single, cohesive place to understand sales and projections across disparate platforms, inventory management was one of Podany's biggest challenges as a small operator, she said.

Podany said that generative AI tools made tricky inventory management easier.

Matt Martian Williams for BI