AI for – Two solopreneurs say generative AI has changed how they plan inventory—pulling sales and stock data into dashboards, forecasting reorders, and even generating marketing campaigns—so they can cut stockouts, reduce textile waste, and regain mental space.
A stockout can erase months of work in a single weekend—especially when your business runs on multiple channels that don’t talk to each other.
That problem sits at the center of how two solo business owners have started using generative AI to manage inventory with less stress. Jen Podany. founder of the ultraviolet and sun protection brand Bluestone Sunshields. described the strain of trying to juggle sales and projections across a website. Amazon. QuickBooks for wholesale accounts. and even Nordstrom through drop shipping. “We’ve got all these different channels that we’re trying to manage,” Podany said. Without one cohesive place to understand sales and forecasting across those platforms. inventory management became one of her biggest challenges as a small operator.
Podany and Steffy Lee Simms, founder of the eco-conscious children’s clothing brand Guava Jammies, both said the past year has brought a new approach: using AI to reduce the time and mental effort it takes to decide what to reorder, when to order, and how much to commit.
Podany built an AI-assisted system with consultant Don Kassing that is integrated into Airtable. In her setup, the AI pulls live data from all her sales channels into easy-to-understand dashboards. The system tracks current stock. incoming inventory. and channel-by-channel sales. then delivers a daily view of what inventory she needs across all her sales channels. what she should be producing or assembling that week. and an eight-week forecast that flags supplier orders before they become urgent. Podany said.
After implementing the system, Podany said her web sales are up 6% year to date and her Amazon sales are up 97%. She attributed much of the improvement to a simpler, painful fix: she is no longer losing ground to stockouts. “When it comes to Amazon. if you do all this work on ads and then stock out. you damage everything you’ve put in up until then. ” Podany said.
Simms came to the problem from a different direction. She said the “multi-level lift” of managing inventory required her to build her own spreadsheets from scratch. decide which metrics actually mattered. and manually crunch numbers to understand what to buy and when. “All of those small decisions became a bottleneck for me,” she said.
For her, AI support arrived first through tools already built into her ecommerce stack. Simms said she largely relied on built-in AI tools on Shopify. which can provide information on product performance. tell her when it’s time to place a reorder. and suggest products that are worth scaling. She also uses Gemini’s integration into Google Sheets to generate suggestions for custom tables and formulas that support decision-making.
“Being able to place very specific order quantities based on forecasting models that my bot has generated for me has helped me to be more efficient in communicating with my manufacturer,” Simms said. She added that she has been able to reduce textile waste through AI forecasting.
Both founders also described how AI didn’t stop at forecasting—it found its way into execution. especially around selling what’s already on hand. Simms said she uses AI to plan marketing campaigns tied directly to sales and inventory levels. She uses the AI-powered tool Klaviyo for email marketing. which integrates with her Shopify inventory data and uses AI to generate suggested campaigns based on the products she has in stock.
For example. Simms said the system is especially useful for promoting products with only a few items left. which she previously found challenging to sell. “What’s better than logging into your email management system and seeing three campaigns already made based on your current inventory?” she said. She added that it helps her “offload inventory a lot quicker without having to use my own capacity to make the decision.”.
Taken together, the stories point to a shift in where the pressure lands for solo operators. When inventory decisions are spread across channels and spreadsheets. the work multiplies—tracking stock. forecasting demand. and translating those numbers into actions like reorders and campaigns. Podany’s Airtable dashboards and Simms’s Shopify and Google Sheets workflows aim to compress that effort into repeatable. AI-supported routines.
For Simms, the biggest payoff wasn’t only sales or waste reduction. It was the mental weight of deciding. She said she used to feel paralyzed by inventory decision-making. Working with AI tools, she said, helped her move past that.
“It’ll give me a very justified, quantifiable reason why I can just go ahead and move forward,” Simms said. She described how the tools can suggest items to reorder for a certain season with past sales data backing the choice. “It’s helped me make wiser business decisions.”
Simms said she now has more mental space to pursue growth opportunities, including adding a women’s wear line—something she said wouldn’t have been feasible without AI supporting the analytical lift of her business operations.
“As solopreneurs, we carry so much mental load,” Simms said. “Finding the tools that create space in your mind is the best way to optimize.”
generative AI inventory management solopreneur Airtable Shopify Klaviyo Amazon sales forecasting stockouts forecasting models Google Sheets Gemini integration