Reimagining order management with AI: Move beyond efficiency and productivity

In today's hypercompetitive, customer-driven marketplace, businesses can't afford inefficiencies in order management (OM). Traditional approaches no longer meet the demands of complex product requirements, supply chain disruptions, and heightened customer expectations. AI offers manufacturers the opportunity to elevate OM from a cost center to a strategic revenue enabler.

AI's promise goes beyond improving efficiency. It enables personalized customer engagement by offering tailored recommendations to boost customer loyalty and identifies cross-sell and upsell opportunities to boost long-term profitability.

A recent advancement is agentic AI, which combines autonomous decision-making with human oversight. By continuously learning from data, it enhances accuracy, predicts disruptions, and personalizes interactions, with the opportunity to transform OM into a proactive, self-optimizing function that drives efficiency, customer satisfaction, and growth.

Despite this potential, only 22% of companies have modernized OM. Now is the time for forward-thinking leaders to embrace AI and turn OM into a strategic growth engine.

Traditional OM is inherently reactive. Teams process orders as they come in, resolve issues after they arise, and work within rigid systems that struggle to adapt to changing customer needs. AI can flip this model on its head, transforming OM into a proactive, intelligent function that optimizes efficiency, costs, and customer satisfaction.

How AI powers process excellence:

• AI-powered models adapt dynamically to evolving business needs, enabling seamless management of complex customer segmentation and workflow
• Process mining and diagnostics identify inefficiencies, compliance gaps, and bottlenecks while eliminating human bias
• AI-driven risk profiling integrates historical data, customer behavior insights, and supply chain risks, ensuring smarter, faster decisions

This results in optimized OM systems that ensure the most cost-effective and customer-friendly fulfillment.

A leading food and beverage company was struggling with order processing costs 40%–50% above industry benchmarks, with over 50% of orders requiring manual intervention. Genpact introduced AI-driven automation to help streamline order management processes, reducing manual effort, improving visibility, and helping to address pricing discrepancies.

The transformation led to a 25%–35% reduction in cost per order, over 30% productivity improvement, a $125 million reduction in pricing discrepancies, and $9 million in recovered invoice write-offs. AI helped strengthen cash flow, improve customer relationships, and optimize efficiencies, turning OM into a proactive, data-driven strategic advantage.

Customer experience is at the heart of every successful business. AI-driven insights enable personalized responses, fostering greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. Whether through AI-powered self-service portals or real-time order tracking notifications, businesses can provide order transparency, alerting customers to statuses, delivery updates, and potential delays.

Imagine an AI-powered copilot that can:

• Instantly access a customer's history, preferences, and sentiment to suggest the best response
• Recommend next-best actions, reducing response times and increasing satisfaction
• Automate routine inquiries while escalating complex issues to human experts

The results? Faster order processing, reduced lead times, and higher service levels, all of which contribute to higher customer satisfaction.

Embedding AI into order management doesn't just benefit customers; it also enhances the employee experience. By eliminating mundane, manual tasks like order validation, data entry, and handling routine customer inquiries, AI allows employees to focus on high-impact activities such as building customer relationships, identifying upsell opportunities, and refining sales strategies.

Happier, more productive employees help foster stronger customer relationships and higher sales conversions. And a more engaged workforce ultimately contributes to overall business success.

A global life sciences company struggled with manual order entry, limited automation, and fragmented customer interactions, with over 50% of inquiries tied to order status. Genpact helped to implement AI-driven order entry automation and an integrated data platform to streamline processes and improve visibility.

The transformation delivered an 8%–10% improvement in customer experience, a 35%–40% productivity boost, more than 75% order automation, a 5% increase in on time, in full (OTIF), and a 0.5%–1% revenue uplift. AI-enabled automation reduced friction, enhanced efficiency, and elevated customer satisfaction, positioning OM as a driver of growth.

Despite technological advancements, many organizations still struggle with blind spots in the order life cycle. AI helps to eliminate these gaps by providing real-time tracking and data-driven insights across the entire OM process.

Key AI capabilities for enhanced visibility:

• Real-time tracking prevents stockouts, overstocks, and fulfillment errors
• Smarter inventory management ensures businesses meet demand without excess costs
• Coordination with supply chain partners improves delivery accuracy and fulfillment timelines

With a 360-degree view of the entire ecosystem, employees can make data-driven decisions that reduce disruptions.

AI-driven automation is transforming order processing by accelerating workflows, reducing costs, and minimizing errors. These efficiencies create a competitive advantage by enabling businesses to:

• Reduce order cycle time through intelligent process automation
• Enhance order accuracy, minimizing costly returns and associated rework
• Increase touchless processing, driving down labor costs while improving service quality

These improvements enhance customer satisfaction and profitability, making AI a potential revenue driver rather than just a cost-saving tool.

A globally managed print and office technology leader struggled with order management inefficiencies because of reduced sales support team, manual processes, and misalignment between sales and administration. Sales reps were burdened with administrative tasks, delaying turnaround times.

Genpact helped to diagnose inefficiencies, implement automation, and transform back-office operations, with expected outcomes including a 25%–30% productivity boost, increased order automation from 30% to 75%, more than $80 million in value unlocked over three years, and a sixfold return on investment. Our work will help streamline operations, reduce friction, and enable sales teams to focus on growth.

AI-powered OM can help drive revenue growth and protects margins. The technology can help facilitate:

• Revenue protection. With more accurate demand forecasting and proactive order tracking, AI helps businesses reduce revenue loss from stockouts and excess inventory. Additionally, customer behavior insights help optimize pricing, fulfillment strategies, and increase revenue per customer
• Cost reduction by reducing inefficiencies in manual order processing, lowering labor expenditure, and minimizing costly mistakes. By optimizing logistics planning, AI also helps to reduce freight, storage, and handling costs, driving overall supply chain efficiency

Critically, AI helps balance cost savings and service quality, enabling businesses to scale profitably while delivering a premium customer experience.

To successfully integrate AI into the OM function, business leaders must take a data-driven, strategic approach. At Genpact, we use our customer experience, sales experience, complexity, and risk (CSCR™) framework to kickstart these journeys.

For those looking to transform their OM function with AI, the next steps include:

1. A comprehensive assessment of the current OM landscape, including qualitative and quantitative benchmarks, comparing performance against best-in-class KPIs within the industry. Process maturity frameworks provide a data-backed view of the as-is state across operating models, policies, technology, and controls, while process mining uncovers inefficiencies, compliance gaps, and performance bottlenecks
2. Using a digital twin to recreate how processes execute across multiple systems, eliminating human bias, capturing 100% of exceptions, and enabling deep analysis of variations. Persona-based user journey mapping further highlights areas of friction for both customers and employees, ensuring AI-driven improvements enhance the total experience
3. Implementing tailored AI-driven strategies with agile operating models to ensure ongoing operational excellence. AI adoption across the OM value chain should focus on touchless order processing, automated validation, intelligent exception management, and dynamic allocation
4. Building a scalable analytics foundation, leveraging AI, machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics for smarter decision-making, reporting, and visualization to boost customer lifetime value

By embedding AI strategically across OM, organizations can move beyond efficiency gains to create a revenue-generating, customer-centric function that enhances profitability and competitive advantage.

AI is transforming OM into a strategic driver of efficiency, intelligence, and customer-centricity. It helps organizations to anticipate challenges, optimize workflows, and enhance experiences, giving businesses a competitive edge while driving profitability.

As autonomous AI evolves, agentic AI will take OM to the next level – shifting it from a reactive process to a proactive, self-optimizing function. By fusing human intelligence with automation, agentic AI will enable smarter decision-making, balancing speed and precision with human oversight. Autonomously managing routine tasks while escalating complex issues for human intervention will help ensure efficiency without sacrificing control.

Organizations that embrace this shift can unlock new levels of agility and profitability, staying ahead in an increasingly digital and customer-first marketplace.