We’re adding AI to Claret. Here’s why it took us two years.

I got asked this question a lot last year. AI was everywhere, and every software company seemed to be racing to slap it onto their product. My answer was always the same: "Not yet. We need to understand how it will actually add value first."

That was late 2023. We're now launching Claret AI Assistant at Unified Symposium next week. So what happened in between? We learned. A lot.

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It started with dad jokes

I'm not kidding. When ChatGPT first came out, I mostly used it for corny dad jokes.

But we were also building Claret Profit Maximizer at the time, and we thought, why not use this new tech to help us build it? That decision changed everything. Not because AI is magic, because it isn't. I did a lot of copying and pasting from ChatGPT into our code editor, a lot of back and forth, a lot of "that's not what I meant." But the combination of AI plus my supply chain experience brought Profit Maximizer to life.

It was awesome. We could leverage this technology to ship something that adds real value for our customers. And we didn't stop there. We used it for marketing copy, landing pages, documentation, pretty much everything.

Here's what I learned from all of that: you have to live with this stuff before you can build it for someone else.

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What 18 months of living with AI taught us

Working with AI every day, you start to see patterns. Context is king, for one thing. The LLMs need the right context, but not too much. Give them too much and the quality of the output tanks.

You also see where it stumbles, where it surprises you, where it frustrates you, where it saves you hours, and where it costs you hours. We spent over a year and a half just learning. Breaking stuff with it. Making stuff with it. Figuring out what it's actually good at.

I'm glad we took that time. It really informed us on how we could bring AI into Claret the right way.

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The moment it clicked

Here's the thing about building tools with AI: you start to see opportunities everywhere.

If you have solid data to anchor the AI with, you can extract real value from it. You can find ways to save money or improve sales that were always hiding in your supply chain data. The opportunity was always there, but people are too busy to dive into that data, or they don't have the supply chain expertise to know what to look for.

That's when it hit me. What if we could give our customers a supply chain guru? One that lives inside their planning tool and actually knows their data? What if we could give people a supply chain superpower?

Not everyone on your team is a supply chain expert. They shouldn't have to be.

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The hard part wasn't the AI

I'll be honest. I thought adding AI to Claret would be a layup. We'd been using it to build stuff, we understood how it worked. How hard could it be?

Turns out: pretty hard. More like a shot from the logo, Steph Curry style.

But here's what surprised me. The hard part wasn't the AI itself. It was data privacy. I didn't think about how much infrastructure we'd need: controls so customers can decide who gets access, conversation data retention policies, audit trails, security reviews. It's a lot.

Your data isn't a basketball for AI to play with. It's your business, and we have to treat it that way. I'm actually glad it was hard, because it means we're taking it seriously. We're not just throwing AI in and moving on.

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What it actually does

So what does the Claret AI Assistant actually do? Rather than building a generic chatbot, we gave it specific tools.

The first set of tools focuses on two areas:

Using Claret. Ask how something works, and it explains it. This gets your team up to speed faster without digging through documentation or waiting for support.

Inventory intelligence. Ask "how much inventory do I have?" and it tells you. Ask "where are opportunities to save money in my inventory?" and it finds them. These are the kinds of questions that used to require building reports or having a supply chain expert on call.

The AI Assistant is built to gain new tools over time. Just like we learned how to use AI across different areas of our business, we'll keep learning how to add more AI-driven tools that help our customers leverage their supply chain data.

This is the beginning, not the end.

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What it doesn't do

This part matters too.

It doesn't make decisions for you. It advises, it recommends, but you stay in control. No automated actions changing your plans without your say.

It doesn't connect to your other systems. It stays within Claret, and your data stays your data. Humans stay in the loop. That's by design.

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Come see it yourself

We're launching Claret AI Assistant at Unified Symposium next week. It's available for all Claret customers, existing and new, as part of your subscription at no extra cost.

If you're skeptical about AI in planning software, good. We were too. That's why we spent two years learning before we shipped anything. Come see it yourself, ask it a question, and see what it finds in your data.

We'll be at Booth 119. See you there.