White Paper

AI In Category Management: Creating Clarity From Complexity

True growth demands adaptation faster than competitors, enabling quicker, more confident decisions. This is where AI plays a pivotal role.

Category Management stands as a critical yet underexplored area, one of the last planning processes to undergo full digitization. This white paper explores its potential, highlighting how machine learning (ML), large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI can transform it.

UNLOCKING BILLIONS IN VALUE FOR CLIENTS IN 30+ INDUSTRIES

In this white paper, you’ll learn:

The gap in modern category planning
Category management remains one of the least digitized functions in retail, still dominated by spreadsheets and siloed decision-making. This paper explores why traditional approaches break down, and what it takes to transition to connected, AI-driven planning across pricing, promotions, and assortment.
AI is not a tool: it’s a system
Not all AI is created equal. Learn how machine learning, large language models, and agentic AI work together as a layered capability. Explore how sequencing them correctly is critical to delivering real commercial impact, and how o9 is uniquely position to enable this.
How to make faster, smarter commercial decisions
See how AI-driven planning connects pricing, promotions, and assortment in real time. This enables continuous scenario simulation, better margin control, and faster responses to market change.

“Success in AI-driven category management hinges on an initiative-based framework that connects customer needs, demand signals, supply realities, and critically in today’s environment, live cost inputs. Simulations via AI models forecast volumes, P&L, and cross-lever impacts, with systems learning and refining their outputs over time.”

James Griffiths

Global Head of RGM, Solutions Consulting, o9 Solutions

What intelligent category management looks like

Leverage machine learning, domain-trained LLMs, and agentic AI to simulate scenarios, recalculate P&L in real time, and orchestrate decisions across commercial levers: transforming category management into a continuously learning system.

Explore these key questions

Most category management processes still rely on spreadsheets, with up to 90% of grocers managing decisions in Excel.

This creates fragmented workflows where pricing, promotions, and assortment decisions are made in silos, disconnected from real-time data. The result? Slower decisions, missed opportunities, and value leakage.

Digitization isn’t just about efficiency: it’s about connecting decisions across the entire commercial P&L in real time.

AI In Category Management: Creating Clarity From Complexity

Category Management stands as a critical yet underexplored area, one of the last planning processes to undergo full digitization.

This white paper explores its potential, highlighting how machine learning (ML), large language models (LLMs), and agentic AI can transform it.

“o9’s Agentic AI is distinctive because it is built on a decade-long symbolic foundation that captures how enterprises plan, decide, govern, and learn, then pairs that rigor with modern LLM capability to deliver neuro-symbolic agents that executives can trust in the real world.”