By / Chen Yulv (CTO, Burgeon Technology)

Recently, AI is undoubtedly the hottest topic in the business world. But as a pragmatic enterprise decision-maker, your core concerns may be very direct: How exactly does AI fit into my actual business? How fast can it be deployed? Can I really see efficiency gains? Can my employees — from basic operators to seasoned managers — pick it up easily? These are the questions we hear most often and understand deepest from serving thousands of retail customers at Burgeon. Through extensive practice, we've found that enterprise AI adoption doesn't happen overnight — it evolves along a clear path, roughly divided into three stages: From ""Mastering AI Tools,"" to ""Integrating AI into Business,"" and ultimately reaching ""AI-Driven Processes.""

Currently, many retail partners are in the eager ""tool usage"" stage, some have bravely entered the deep waters of ""business integration,"" and truly ""native"" enterprises with deep AI-gene transformation remain a minority. But the clear visible trend foretells the future of retail.

Stage One

AI Tools ""Mow Down"" Repetitive Work, Unleashing Frontline Productivity! The first step many retail enterprises take with AI often starts with eliminating those time-consuming, labor-intensive yet low-value ""standard actions."" Imagine: filling in daily reports, checking inventory, processing reimbursements, doing basic reconciliations... These tasks consume a large portion of employees' time but rarely drive direct growth. Employees suffer from repetitive drudgery; enterprises agonize over labor costs.

This is precisely where Burgeon's AI Cloud Assistant shines! Its core philosophy: ""No forms, just commands!"" No more jumping between multiple system interfaces, painstakingly finding fields and filling out complex forms. Just speak your request naturally, like talking to an assistant: ""Check the top 10 sales for all stores in the South District yesterday,"" ""Check inventory of size S for item A in warehouse, transfer 20 to store B,"" ""Generate a closing report for last month's promotional campaign"" — the AI Cloud Assistant instantly understands intent, automatically calls the backend system, and completes the task in one go.

Value delivered: Zero learning curve — employees master it almost instantly; efficiency gains are immediate — a few spoken words replace what used to take hours (deeply integrated with Feishu, DingTalk, and WeCom, no platform switching needed)! Like a super add-on, it specifically eliminates standardized repetitive tasks, freeing the team to focus on more valuable work.

Stage Two

AI Goes Deep into Frontline Operations, Becoming Your ""Gold-Standard Sales Partner""! AI's value must not stop at efficiency tools. Retail enterprises expect it to truly participate in core business decisions and execution, driving revenue growth. When a store associate needs more precise recommendations and script support, when operations needs real-time data to make decisions — how can AI help? Burgeon Technology's AI Smart Badge was born for this. This is not a physical name badge but a ""business-savvy"" super intelligent agent armed around every store associate. We build an exclusive knowledge corpus for each brand, refine premium scripts, and integrate multi-dimensional data sources including member profiles, real-time inventory, and promotional campaigns. The high-frequency interaction between sales associates and customers is precisely where we record successful cases, extracting truly effective ""gold-standard scripts"" as powerful sales training tools.

Value delivered: New employees gain ""veteran-level"" insights with significantly improved conversion rates; store associates are no longer alone, gaining a ""24/7 gold partner""; inventory turnover accelerates, slow movers become bestsellers. AI is no longer just an assistant — it becomes a key business partner empowering the frontline and driving revenue.

Stage Three

AI Drives Process Reinvention, Creating the ""Unattended Sales"" New Paradigm! The ultimate goal of AI transformation is to become the designer and driver of business processes. Take private domain operations as an example: the traditional model heavily relies on sales associates manually sending group messages, pushing products, personal outreach, and follow-ups. Labor costs are high, response speed is limited, and scalable, personalized service is near impossible.

Burgeon's ""Private Domain AI Unattended Sales Associate"" solution completely disrupts this process! In your WeCom groups, WeChat official account, or mini-program, users are no longer waiting for sales service — they're interacting with a 24/7 intelligent sales associate. It proactively identifies user needs: providing outfit advice based on user photos or text descriptions, precisely interpreting product highlights and real-time promotions, intelligently pushing coordinated outfits, or even directly driving conversions. From demand identification to final conversion, AI completes the loop — no manual monitoring needed throughout.

Value delivered: Labor costs drop dramatically; service response reaches seconds; conversion efficiency multiplies; members enjoy highly personalized, instantly responsive service experiences with greatly enhanced stickiness. AI here is not just a participant — it is the core engine reshaping private domain operations, releasing enormous productivity and creating brand-new customer experiences.

Burgeon Is Reshaping Retail — Section A

From Stage One (lowering the barrier to use and forming habits) to Stage Two (deepening into business and creating incremental value) to Stage Three (reinventing processes and improving efficiency) — Burgeon provides not isolated AI tools but a complete AI engine matrix supporting retail enterprises' intelligent advancement.

After successfully crossing from tool application to process intelligence, we will lead full-domain intelligent scenarios toward a new stage of AI self-operation.

""Smart Distribution Revolution"": Once, store allocation heavily relied on experienced operations staff, consuming significant time and effort, prone to errors and omissions. With Burgeon's AI solution, the system automatically analyzes daily store sales, real-time inventory, and sell-through velocity data, generating precise distribution and replenishment recommendations within the same day! Operations staff only need to review and confirm. Value: Allocation decision efficiency improves by over 90%, labor is greatly released, slow-moving inventory drops significantly, and bestseller stockout risk is reduced.

""Private Domain Conversion Leap"": Too many members to serve? Personalized experiences for thousands seem impossible? Burgeon AI empowers private domain operations: based on member profiles and behavior preferences, automatically generates personalized recommendation scripts, product bundle suggestions, and precise activity reminders. Value: Member conversion rate improves significantly by over 20%, personalized service wins customer hearts, and member activity and repurchase rates both rise.

""Cross-Department Intelligent Collaboration"": Departments waging their own promotional battles? Information silos between departments causing decision conflicts? Burgeon AI integrates brand campaigns, product inventory, store execution, and other full-domain data flows, providing a unified business perspective so different departments make collaborative decisions based on the same ""source of truth."" Value: Breaks information silos, improves cross-department collaboration efficiency and decision consistency, ensures marketing activities land precisely, and clarifies ROI on resource investments.

AI: The Ultimate Engine of Intelligent Retail Operations

We firmly believe that retail's digital transformation is not merely about deploying a few more systems and filling out more reports — the core lies in a complete upgrade of underlying operational logic! In today's environment where instant messaging (IM) is the core work setting, Burgeon is dedicated to making AI a true ""Intelligent Operations Trustee"" in your enterprise — making organizational structures more lightweight and flexible, business decisions faster and more precise, and execution more stable and efficient! We are pragmatically positioning AI for knowledge management and efficiency enhancement. We are actively using AI to address pain points in internal knowledge management. The company has vast knowledge bases — IT manuals, HR policies, SOPs, and more. Traditional self-learning or centralized training approaches are limited when employee turnover is high and business is busy. Now, when employees encounter operational questions at work, such as inventory transfers or store deliveries, instead of flipping through lengthy manuals or relying on ""experts,"" they can simply ask the AI knowledge base assistant. It quickly locates and provides relevant chapter content for immediate use, significantly shortening fragmented learning cycles and improving efficiency. Since launching last December, hundreds of queries per month attest to its effectiveness.

Beyond knowledge management, we are also exploring AI applications in marketing material production, AI-assisted recruitment, personalized product design support, and functional fabric R&D — all aimed at improving efficiency in specific areas.

System Integration and Data Collaboration

In advancing China's digitalization, this year we focus on two key projects: CRM system upgrade and private domain mini-program platform optimization.

The major CRM upgrade aims to achieve a 360-degree consumer insight. Future analytics will go beyond basic transaction data (purchase frequency, amounts, etc.) to deeply integrate consumer behavior data for more three-dimensional profiles. For private domain building, we are re-integrating the brand's WeChat mini-programs to build a unified private domain platform. The new platform will support rapid new store launches, enabling efficient replication of brand success formulas, and is planned to expand to other group brands in the second half of the year.

If we successfully complete the mini-program and CRM integration and continuously deepen and refine their capabilities, MaxMara will rank at the forefront of digitalization in China's luxury sector.

I always believe true digitalization must not stop at any single area (like focusing solely on MarTech) but should run through the entire business process. For example, a successful product launch campaign requires integrating audience matching data, media placement plans, actual product arrival quantities and timing, logistics and customs clearance progress, and even production schedules — achieving precise coordination between marketing activities and supply chain support. This is the direction we continuously strive toward: making digitalization the solid cornerstone enabling MaxMara's classic warmth and modern efficiency to coexist.

This article is featured in Burgeon New Vision, edited-in-chief by Sun Yihui, Chairman of Burgeon Technology, and produced by Burgeon Research Institute.