British multinational retailer Marks & Spencer’s (M&S) Clothing & Home business is set to undergo a significant digital transformation, with o9 Solutions at the helm of modernising its planning systems.  

The retailer will deploy o9's AI-powered platform, Digital Brain, to replace and update M&S's existing merchandise planning, sales stock and intake, and range planning systems into a unified, integrated platform. 

The three-year roll-out of o9's Digital Brain platform will make M&S's Clothing & Home business more agile and responsive to customer needs and market trends.  

The platform consolidates all essential retail planning functions into a single, adaptable data model powered by o9's Enterprise Knowledge Graph technology.  

The integration spans planning processes including merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, forecasting, allocation, replenishment, promotion, markdown optimisation and supplier collaboration. 

M&S Clothing & Home managing director Richard Price stated: "As we reshape for growth, we are investing to modernise and upgrade our systems so we can create greater visibility and collaboration between teams and suppliers, improve planning and availability and enable us to be more tailored and localised with our ranging. 

“By having an end-to-end planning platform, we will be able to better use data and AI to inform decision making and future planning so we can continue to be more relevant, more often to our customers.” 

M&S Clothing & Home division reported an 11.5% growth in sales, with like-for-like sales up by 11.2% in the financial year 2022/23.  

In January 2024, M&S disclosed a 4.8% increase in the division’s sales during the 2023 Christmas trading period.