Know what you have. Before the customer asks.

An AI agent that runs the work around your stock instead of replacing where the stock is recorded. It reads what you already keep, compares levels against reorder points, drafts the purchase order to the right supplier, flags a price that's changed, and prepares your stock counts. You approve anything that spends money.

No, and that's deliberate. The agent reads the sheet you already keep, along with POS exports and the supplier invoices in your inbox. Migrations are where these projects usually die, so this one doesn't start with one. If you later want the record somewhere sturdier the agent can build that too, once it's earned it.

No. Counting what's physically on a shelf is a job for a person in the room, and software that claims otherwise tends to get switched off. What the agent does is everything around the count: it prepares the sheet, takes your numbers back, works out the variance, and shows you only the lines that disagree with what it expected.

From how fast an item has actually been moving and how long that supplier has actually been taking, rather than a fixed minimum typed in once and never revisited. It tells you what's short, groups it by supplier so you place one order rather than six, and waits for your yes.

Same job, different word, and which one you use tends to follow your trade. Retail and ecommerce say inventory. Kitchens, workshops and vans tend to say stock. The agent does both. What actually differs is the unit of the problem: a kitchen tracks a case that becomes portions, a van tracks parts against jobs, a shop tracks a line that sells in two channels at once.

The order stops and you hear about it. A price change is the thing most likely to be missed, because the order still looks normal and the margin only breaks later. The agent compares what it was quoted against what it paid last time and puts the difference in front of you before anything's sent.

Yes. Stock held in more than one place is where a single sheet usually breaks, because the same line exists twice and neither copy is right. The agent keeps them separate, tells you when one site is short while another's holding too much, and can move it between them rather than buying more.

Not unless you tell it to. By default it drafts and waits. Anything that commits money comes to you with what it costs, who it's from and what changed since last time, and nothing is sent until you reply. If there are routine lines you'd rather it just handled, you can say so and it will.

Whatever you have now. A spreadsheet, a POS with an export, or a pile of supplier emails is enough for the agent to be useful in a day. It gets more accurate as it sees more of your ordering, and you don't have to model the whole catalogue first to find that out.