SmartshopAI: An AI-Assisted Retail Management Framework For Small Shops

This paper presents SmartShopAI, a layered framework for small-shop retail that integrates billing, inventory control, alerts, and three AI advisory modules. Its core contribution is its architectural design, which features a transactional core with explicit integrity rules, isolated visual-versus-database stock tracking, and AI safety constraints. No performance metrics are claimed; the expected benefits—improved stock accuracy, automated reorder alerts, and reduced routine effort—are hypotheses to be tested via the empirical protocol in Section VIII. Next steps include implementing the core, collecting a retail dataset, and evaluating all modules against Table III metrics.

[1]   T. W. Gruen, D. S. Corsten, and S. Bharadwaj, "Retail out-of-stocks: A worldwide examination of extent, causes and consumer responses," Grocery Manufacturers of America, Washington, DC, USA, 2002. [2]   D. Corsten and T. Gruen, "Desperately seeking shelf availability: An examination of the extent, the causes, and the efforts to address retail out-of-stocks," Int. J. Retail Distrib. Manag., vol. 31, no. 12, 2003, doi: 10.1108/09590550310507731. [3]   B. Lim and S. Zohren, "Time-series forecasting with deep learning: A survey," Philos. Trans. R. Soc. A, vol. 379, no. 2194, Art. no. 20200209, 2021, doi: 10.1098/rsta.2020.0209. [4]   L. Breiman, "Random forests," Mach. Learn., vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 5–32, 2001, doi: 10.1023/A:1010933404324. [5]   T. Yu et al., "Spider: A large-scale human-labeled dataset for complex and cross-domain semantic parsing and text-to-SQL task," in Proc. EMNLP, 2018, pp. 3911–3921, doi: 10.18653/v1/D18-1425. [6]   J. Redmon, S. Divvala, R. Girshick, and A. Farhadi, "You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection," in Proc. IEEE CVPR, 2016, pp. 779–788, doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.91. [7]   G. Bradski, "The OpenCV library," Dr. Dobb's J. Softw. Tools, 2000. [8]   F. Pedregosa et al., "Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python," J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 12, pp. 2825–2830, 2011.