Canadian firm Lightspeed Commerce has launched an AI-powered automation tool to help retailers improve inventory accuracy, speed up product availability and reduce missed sales caused by stock discrepancies.

For many retailers, receiving inventory remains a manual and error-prone process. Staff often type line items from packing slips into the PoS or reconcile spreadsheets across multiple systems. This fragmented workflow can lead to duplicate products, mismatched SKUs, pricing errors and inaccurate stock counts that impact margins and customer experience.

This AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) tool transforms this process into a simple scan-and-review workflow.

Retailers can scan or upload a supplier packing slip or invoice, and the OCR technology paired with AI automatically reads the document and extracts product details, including SKUs, quantities, pricing and variants, directly into a draft purchase order within the PoS. Instead of manually entering each line item, retailers simply review and approve.

For deliveries with multiple items, this converts line-by-line data entry into a fast digital process that saves time and reduces errors. The result is more accurate inventory, faster product availability and fewer missed sales caused by stock discrepancies.

“Receiving inventory has historically been a time-consuming and error-prone process task for retailers,” said Dax Dasilva, CEO of Lightspeed. “Instead of spending hours typing in line items, merchants can now use the power of AI to automate the process, reduce costly mistakes and focus more time on serving customers and growing their business.”

With AI OCR, when a document is scanned, the system extracts structured product data and maps them to the appropriate product fields. Incoming information is automatically matched against existing catalogue records to validate entries and reduce duplicates before inventory is finalised. Retailers can adjust quantities or pricing, approve updates or export to CSV for bulk edits if needed.

Built natively into Lightspeed Retail and the Lightspeed Scanner app, it requires no third-party tools or integrations. Teams can access it from a scanner, tablet or desktop, making it easier to receive inventory from the stockroom or sales floor within the same system they use every day.

The AI OCR is available now in beta for select customers, with broader availability planned for the second quarter of this year.

Lightspeed (www.lightspeedhq.com) is a PoS and payments platform powering businesses in more than 100 countries. With flexible omnichannel technology, it brings together PoS, ecommerce, embedded payments, inventory, reporting, staff and supplier management, financial services, and a wholesale retail network. The firm was founded in Montréal, Canada, in 2005.