When it comes to complex retail data, more isn’t necessarily better. Not only are business resources often wasted gathering redundant or extraneous data, but even useful data can be squandered if not parsed and interpreted correctly.

At the WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit presentation Escape the Data Trap: Reclaim Employee Productivity and Recoup Hidden Costs, Chris Akrimi, head of revenue, and Danielle Fairfield, vice president, head of retail at business-to-business e-commerce platform NuOrder by Lightspeed explained how they help companies be more efficient with their data.

The company currently works with 7,000 brands and half a million retailers, so it has keen insights into how complex such data can be, especially since consumers are shopping online, instore, via marketplaces, B2B wholesale and more, and every channel is highly business specific. “You have to ingest the data, collect the data, enrich the data, then you actually have to push the data,” Akrimi said. “There’s an exuberant amount of time that is undertaken in order to get this data in the right state to make some informed decisions.”

AI can help take time-consuming tasks and transform them so companies can focus on output, customers, buying and selling. Akrimi noted that by 2030, just six years away, almost half of the fashion ecosystem will be utilizing some form of AI to help increase and elevate their business. But with only a 4 percent adoption of AI tools in the fashion industry today, there’s a long way to go.

“AI is going to become table stakes, but in order to get the most out of AI, it all starts with data,” said Fairfield, noting that NuOrder by Lightspeed focuses on performance data, customer data, financial data, marketing data and product data.

Product data is the most important — style, number, cost, color, description — looking at item level, attribution required to make buy and, most importantly, sell the item. However, not only do all retailers need this data, they all need the same data.

“Eighty-nine percent of the product data we need is the same across brands and retailers. But not only is it the same, it is time-consuming and expensive to manage,” she said.

Using standardization, integrations, automations and AI, brands and retailers who utilize the NuOrder by Lightspeed platform, on average see a 91 percent time savings through integrations and a 93 percent reduction in manual entry of this product data, she said.

The average brand spends 28,000 hours creating, collecting, maintaining and sharing this data, totally about $1 million a year,” she said. Meanwhile, the average retailers spends more than half a million hours across all resources, collecting, creating, maintaining and sharing that data, amounting to almost $20 million.

“What that means is, for the 60 brands and retailers that are here today, you are spending 5 million hours collectively and almost $200 billion on the exact same product data,” she said.