AI for retail and distribution in India

The daily friction in Indian retail and distribution

A typical distributor receives orders as WhatsApp messages, voice notes and photos of handwritten lists. Supplier invoices come as PDFs and paper. Someone enters it all into Tally or Busy, then chases payments by phone. Stock in the system rarely matches the shelf, so reorders are late and dead stock builds up.

None of this needs a large IT budget to fix. It needs the right inputs captured once, checked automatically and connected to the system you already use.

Supplier invoices and order capture

Document AI reads printed and handwritten documents in English and Indian languages, then validates them against your item and party masters. See our document ai and ocr service for how we build it.

• Supplier GST invoices read and posted to Tally with line items, HSN and tax checked.
• Handwritten or photographed order lists converted into draft sales orders.
• Delivery challans and e-way bills matched to invoices.
• Duplicate invoice detection before payment.

WhatsApp and follow-up automation

Routine messages are the easiest hours to give back, using the official WhatsApp Business Platform with approved templates. See our business process automation service for how we build it.

• Order confirmation, dispatch and delivery updates sent automatically.
• Payment reminders to retailers based on outstanding ageing.
• Reorder prompts to customers who usually buy on a cycle.
• Daily sales and collection summaries for the owner.

Inventory, billing and dashboards

When Tally alone is not enough, we build the missing layer around it. See our custom software and bi dashboards service for how we build it.

• Multi-godown stock with batch and expiry tracking and barcode scanning.
• Salesman and dealer apps for field orders, working offline.
• Dashboards for sales by product, area and salesman, and overdue collections.

Assistants for catalogues and staff

A grounded assistant can answer questions about products, prices and policies from your own catalogue, helping both customers and new staff. See our generative ai service for how we build it.

• Product and price lookup in plain language, including Hindi and Marathi.
• Draft product descriptions and promotional messages for review.

Keep your existing accounting software

Almost every retailer and distributor we speak to already has Tally, Busy or Zoho in place and a trained accountant who knows it. Replacing that is rarely worth the disruption. Our approach is to add a capture layer in front of it: read the document or message, validate it, and post a clean entry for approval.

The human stays in the loop for anything the system is unsure about. A wrong HSN code or a misread quantity is cheaper to catch at the review screen than in a GST filing. Over time, as corrections feed back into the system, fewer entries need review. For help deciding between a ready-made tool and a custom one, read custom AI vs off-the-shelf.

Use cases at a glance

Where to start

Start with the process that eats the most hours each week. For most distributors that is either supplier invoice entry or order capture from WhatsApp. Count the documents per month, multiply by minutes per document, and you have a baseline to measure against.

For example, if your team enters 400 supplier invoices a month at six minutes each, that is 40 hours of typing that a pilot can target first.

Our usual path is the same in every industry: a short discovery session, a prototype on a sample of your own data, production on Google Cloud, then improvement under an annual maintenance contract. See pricing for how that is structured, or talk to us about your workflow.