The POS Software Blog

The POS Software Blog

News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.

TagRetailer AI

Retailer AI: what the time savings are actually worth

August 23, 2026
3 Min read
R

Small business retailers using the Retailer AI tools built into the Tower Systems POS software report saving between five and ten hours a week. That is a substantial claim, so it is worth putting dollars against the hours and showing where they come from.

At a staff cost of $35 an hour, five hours a week is $175, or $9,100 a year. Ten hours is $350 a week and $18,200 a year. Even at the bottom of that range, the saving covers the software cost.

Hours are only the visible part. The time comes back to the owner, or it goes to the shop floor where people sell things.

Supplier invoices are the single biggest saving, typically three to five hours a week. The manual version is typing invoices line by line, checking cost prices and setting retail prices. The Retailer AI version is dragging the supplier’s PDF or spreadsheet into the software, which extracts the lines, matches quantities, updates costs and prepares the stock arrival in seconds.

Business insights save another two to three hours. Rather than exporting reports and hunting for trends late at night, a retailer runs any standard report and clicks AI Insights. The software answers in plain English: which margins moved, what stock is dead, what deserves attention.

Product descriptions save one to two hours for retailers selling online, with titles, descriptions and blog copy drafted ready for Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento. Reordering and market price comparison round the list out.

Then there are the savings nobody can put on a timesheet. Retailer AI flags unusual voids, no-sale drawer opens, price overrides and refund patterns, which are the early signs of internal theft. It also cross-references stock counts against expected levels to show which categories keep losing stock. Shrinkage rarely announces itself. This does.

Retailer AI is embedded in the platform and draws on leading models including Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT. It is built for the specialty retail Tower Systems serves, including bookshops, garden centres, jewellers, pet shops, toy shops, produce businesses and firearms dealers.

“We cut supplier invoice entry by 8 hours a week. That is a full business day back, every week.” — rural supply store, Queensland

“Retailer AI saves us 10 hours every week on stock arrivals and inventory admin alone.” — Shane, Pets R Us, Raymond Terrace NSW

The quickest way to test any of this is with your own paperwork. A fifteen minute demonstration will process actual supplier invoices in front of you.

Further AI tools are in development, with details to follow closer to release.

Locally made. Locally supported.

Read onRead later

Free AI POS software support at 11pm: the Tower Systems chatbot

August 19, 2026
2 Min read
F

Questions do not keep business hours. A retailer reconciling at the end of a long day, or setting up a new supplier at ten o’clock at night, needs an answer then. Not the following morning.

The AI chatbot on the Tower Systems website sits in the bottom left hand corner of every page. Clicking the box opens it. From there, it is a conversation.

What separates it from general purpose AI tools is what it has been trained on. The chatbot is trained only on Tower Systems software and the company’s own documentation. It does not roam the internet and it does not invent answers. When it does not know something it says so, and it makes clear how to reach a human. That constraint is deliberate, and it is the reason the answers can be relied on.

The usage patterns have been telling. People are asking questions at nine, ten and eleven o’clock at night. One user worked through seven or eight questions in a single session, building on each answer as they went.

The scope is broader than software mechanics. Rather than only explaining which button to press, the chatbot offers context and helps with the decision sitting behind the question. One retailer described a tough trading period and received useful business advice in response.

It is also not generic. It was built for the channels Tower Systems serves: jewellers, garden centres, bike shops, newsagents, bookshops, pet shops, toy shops, music shops, camping and outdoors businesses, fishing businesses and firearms dealers. The advice reflects those specific trading realities.

More than forty languages are supported, which matters in Australian and New Zealand retail. The chatbot is available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, at no cost, to anyone who visits the site.

It sits alongside the Retailer AI tools inside the software itself, where retailers report saving between five and ten hours a week on supplier invoices, insights, product descriptions and reordering. What those hours are worth in dollars is a story for its own post.

Human support has not gone anywhere. The chatbot simply means the wait is optional.

Tower Systems builds POS software for specialty retailers across Australia and New Zealand. Locally made. Locally supported.

Read onRead later

Advice for retailers on chasing genuine savings: what Retailer AI does to the weekly workload

August 15, 2026
3 Min read
A

AI in retail gets discussed far more than it gets used, and most of the discussion is about possibility rather than the specific, dull tasks that consume a retailer’s week.

The Tower Systems software has had AI tools embedded since 2022. They now carry a name, Retailer AI, and they are aimed squarely at those dull tasks.

The Ai tools we offer cover so many areas now. Here are just some of them …

Supplier invoices

This is where most retailers find the largest single saving. It’s the easiest to access saving too.

A supplier invoice arrives as a PDF, an Excel file or a typed Word document, and traditionally someone keys it in line by line. Cost prices, quantities, retail prices, item after item. On a large invoice that is an hour or more, and every line is a chance for a typing error that later becomes a pricing error.

Retailer AI reads the invoice and imports it.

The saving is partly time and partly accuracy. An invoice imported correctly means stock on hand is right, cost prices are right and margin reporting can be trusted. An error introduced at this point travels a long way through a business before anyone notices it.

If an invoice does not import cleanly, it can be emailed to Tower Systems, where the team works on making that supplier’s invoices import easily and accurately in future.

The other tools

Product descriptions. Writing headings and descriptions for online listings is slow work that most retailers put off. Retailer AI drafts them, which helps stock get found in search.

Price comparison. Checking pricing against other retailers without spending an afternoon on it.

Replenishment ordering. Generating an order without working through a long, multi-step process.

Theft detection. Flagging transaction patterns worth a closer look.

Business insights. A plain-text end of shift summary comparing the day with recent trading, in place of a stack of reports.

Where the savings land

Retailers using the tools report saving between five and ten hours a week. The figure varies with the business and with how many of the tools are in use.

Hours are the visible saving. Harder to count, and probably worth more, is the effect on decisions. A decision made sooner, on complete and accurate information, tends to be a better decision.

There is a financial point worth noting too. Retailers choose their own AI model, whether ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and control their own AI spending directly. Tower Systems does not sit between the retailer and that access, and does not add a margin to it.

Getting started

Begin with invoices. It is the clearest saving and the easiest to measure. Time one invoice keyed by hand, then time one imported, and the comparison makes the case on its own.

Add one tool a month after that. Trying everything at once rarely sticks.

Book a training session. The tools are included in the software, and the free training covers how to use them.

Retailer AI is available across the specialty markets Tower Systems serves, including newsagents, jewellers, bike shops, garden centres, bookshops, pet shops and toy shops.

Read onRead later

Meet Retailer AI: AI tools made for local independent retail

August 9, 2026
3 Min read
M

We have added a collection of AI tools to our POS software. We call it Retailer AI, and it is made for local independent retail businesses, from the front counter to the back office.

Retailer AI uses Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The work happens inside the POS software you already run, so there is no new system to learn and nothing to copy between apps.

This all started in 2022 and has evolved since. What’s changes is that we now call the collection of AI tools in our POS software Retailer AI.

What the tools do

Invoice processing turns a PDF or paper supplier invoice into an electronic invoice ready to import. Anyone who has keyed a 200-line invoice by hand on a Friday afternoon will understand the appeal.

Reordering watches your inventory and sales, then drafts replenishment orders for you. You buy what sells and skip what sits.

The AI insights dashboard gives shop floor staff a view of what matters today, so they can plan their time and look after customers between serves.

Reports now come with a click-through to plain advice on what to do next. If you have ever closed a report none the wiser, this one is for you.

There is more. Product names and SEO-ready descriptions are written for you so shoppers can find your products online. A local price comparison shows where you sit in your market. Blog posts are written and published for products you manage, which keeps your website fresh without you typing at the kitchen table at 10pm.

What it is worth

A typical business using these tools saves between 5 and 8 labour hours a week. At $35 an hour, that is $175 to $280 a week. One pet shop owner in regional NSW says he saves 10 hours a week. A Victorian newsagency used the tools to find more than $10,000 in dead stock, money it can now put into stock that moves.

Those numbers are why we built this. Hours back and better buying decisions are what a small retail business notices week to week.

Our approach

There is a lot of noise about AI right now, and plenty of it is hype. We are not selling hype. These tools exist to make everyday retail tasks quicker and everyday decisions better. You stay in control of how much or how little you use, and we do not profit from what you spend on AI.

See it working

The best way to judge Retailer AI is to watch it handle your own work. Book a free demo, email our sales team on sales@towersystems.com.au with your questions, or take a look at our YouTube channel to see the tools in action.

Read onRead later
The POS Software Blog

Categories

Categories

Categories

Recent Comments

Monthly Archives