Blue Yonder has expanded its Cognitive Solutions suite with new AI-powered agents and orchestration capabilities aimed at linking planning and execution more closely, helping retailers respond swiftly to real-world conditions and improve margins in a fragmented channel landscape.
Retailers under mounting pressure from fragmenting channels and tighter margins are being offered a fresh set of AI-enabled tools by Blue Yonder intended to bring planning and execution closer ...
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together and to make inventory decisions more responsive to real-world conditions.
According to the announcement by Blue Yonder, the vendor has expanded its Cognitive Solutions suite with machine-learning agents and orchestration capabilities designed to reduce siloed workflows across merchandising, inventory and fulfilment. “Increasing customer demands for speed, personalisation 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.
The company says the new planning agents accelerate decision cycles by surfacing profit risks, recommending actions and creating optimised assortments from trend signals. A mobile companion for allocation and replenishment is presented as a means for planners to approve or adjust daily store orders remotely, while an upgraded Inventory Ops Agent offers recommendations for multi-sourcing changes through natural-language prompts. Blue Yonder also describes enhancements to micro-space planning that automatically generate store-level planograms and let store associates capture compliance images via a smartphone app to feed back into local assortment logic.
On the execution side, Blue Yonder highlights improvements intended to tighten order orchestration and returns management. The vendor reports advances to sourcing simulation and rebalancing that enable order-driven demand planning across fulfilment nodes, and a Smart Disposition engine it says can predict resale value of returned items to route stock for better margin recovery. Native AI agents for order management are claimed to provide real-time inventory visibility and proactive fulfilment recommendations, while a customer service agent is said to help resolve order queries faster.
Blue Yonder points to performance gains during a peak trading period as evidence of scale: the company states it surfaced inventory availability in as little as 10–12 milliseconds and produced estimated delivery dates for more than 1.2 billion SKUs over the 2025 Thanksgiving weekend, which it says improved conversion for its retail customers.
Warehouse and logistics tools have been pushed in parallel, with an emphasis on adaptive operations and explainable guidance. Blue Yonder’s Warehouse Ops Agent is described as delivering pre-shift insight and dynamic slotting and resource recommendations to sustain throughput, and the vendor says combined warehouse and transport improvements helped optimise more than 23 million human tasks in warehouses in the first ten months of 2025. Logistics enhancements are said to include persona-based workflows that highlight unrouteable loads and propose mitigations such as backhaul opportunities.
Industry observers consulted in the materials cited by the company frame these moves as part of a broader trend. “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,” said Jordan Speer, Research Director, Worldwide Retail Product Sourcing, Fulfillment and Sustainability Strategies, IDC.
Blue Yonder underlines network effects as a strategic advantage. The vendor says its Blue Yonder Network connects retailers to more than 172,000 trading partners, and it points to a platform architecture built to support synchronous planning and rapid scenario simulation. That positioning is reinforced by the company’s longstanding technology relationship with Microsoft Azure; according to a Microsoft case study and industry commentary, Blue Yonder runs its Luminate cognitive capabilities on Azure to deliver global reach, secure infrastructure and the capacity to run hundreds of simulations in minutes, collapsing the gap between planning and execution.
Other recent corporate updates referenced in the materials include December 2024 product releases that focused on breaking down operational silos, improving collaboration between demand, supply and finance teams and reducing UI latency, Blue Yonder reported user interface load times up to 40% faster. Broader transportation and sustainability features introduced in 2025 were said to add emissions tracking, predictive routing and role-based transportation management to shift operations from reactive to proactive.
While the vendor frames these enhancements as margin-protecting and customer-centric, its statements should be read as company claims about product impact. Independent customer experiences and third-party benchmarks will be central to assessing how effectively the new agents and orchestration layers perform in diverse retail environments, particularly where existing IT complexity and legacy processes can impede rapid adoption.
Blue Yonder will be demonstrating its expanded capabilities publicly at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show in New York from 11–13 January 2026, with presentations and customer panels at its booth and a Big Ideas Session on 12 January featuring executives from Fabletics and REI. The company will also present sessions at NRF Rev and host invite-only industry events during the conference.
Source: Noah Wire Services
