Retail operations, re-architected for AI
We turn the AI across your customer care, commerce, content and returns into compounding outcomes
Managing our consumer experience is complex. The communications and clarity we now get are taking that complexity away. Through a simplified, harmonized approach, Firstsource has created a solution with a consistent methodology and real benefits at its core."
Why IT Matters NOW
Everyone has AI. Few have it running the operation.
Across grocery, specialty retail, fashion, consumer brands, and marketplaces, AI is in every pilot, yet cost to serve, returns, and content demand keep climbing while shoppers expect personalization at scale. Harnessing AI to move them takes an operating system: the domain rules, context and live signals that turn scattered AI into outcomes.
Cost to serve
~30%
of operating cost removable through AI-led automation
Seasonal spikes, returns and tier-1 contacts dominate retail operating cost. The unmet mandate is deflecting and resolving them autonomously—without breaking the shopper experience.
Personalization
10%–15%
revenue lift available from personalization at scale
Shoppers expect relevance across every channel, but fragmented data and content keep it out of reach. The lift is real for retailers that can operationalize it.
Content & commerce
37%
content-production cost reduction with AI content ops
Catalog scale, seasonal campaigns and marketplace listings outrun manual production. Agentic content and commerce close the gap—if they run inside the operation.
We don’t bolt AI onto the store. We re-architect it for AI—shopper to shelf—and run it, so intelligence actually operates
Proof in production
Real outcomes, inside real retailers
Operations run to the number—across care, commerce, content and returns, for grocers, specialty retailers, consumer brands and marketplaces.
Customer care | Leading value grocer
Cost down, experience held
A leading value grocer migrated and re-engineered its customer-care operation—cutting cost per contact and handle time through process optimization while protecting the shopper experience.
Delivered process-optimization savings on top of the unit-cost reduction
50%
lower cost per contact
13%
reduction in AHT
Consumer brand | Global home-products brand
Fewer contacts, happier customers
A global consumer-products brand applied Lean and Six Sigma with conversation intelligence to deflect avoidable contacts and lift quality—cutting volume while raising satisfaction and resolution.
Consistent 5% month-over-month growth alongside the experience gains
80%
reduction in customer contacts
31 → 44
NPS improvement
+30%
first-contact resolution
Commerce | Global e-commerce marketplace
Merchants onboarded faster, GMS up
A global e-commerce marketplace re-engineered merchant onboarding and seller operations—accelerating time-to-live and growing the share of high-value merchants, directly lifting gross merchandise sales.
High-value merchant share grown to 15% of the base, with outcome-based pricing.
2X
faster merchant onboarding
15%
high-value merchant share
£130M
sales driven (specialty retail)
Kairos the operating system
The operating system that turns intelligence into outcomes
It sits between your systems of record and the agents you run, giving every AI system the memory, domain rules, and live signals it needs to act with the full picture across every shopper and commerce workflow.
The operating system compounds domain intelligence, not rented model horsepower. AI models commoditize, but the retail judgment encoded in the Domain Harness does not. It is portable across any agent stack, with no lock-in.
The operating system compounds domain intelligence, not rented model horsepower. AI models commoditize, but the retail judgment encoded in the Domain Harness does not. It is portable across any agent stack, with no lock-in.
05
AI-native operations: Agents
Customer care, sales and clienteling copilots, returns and dispute agents, and content and merchandising agents execute across customer care, commerce, content, and returns.
Varies by retailer
04
Domain intelligence: Domain Harness
The Domain Harness encodes what should happen through 24 years of retail expertise captured as pre-built skills, playbooks, and guardrails for order, returns, and refund policies, clienteling and loyalty logic, brand voice, PCI DSS, and consumer protection rules. It is portable across any agent stack, with no lock-in.
Core · compounds
03
Organizational context: Intelligent Context Framework (ICF)
The ICF captures what happened by carrying order and basket history, loyalty status, prior interactions, and return patterns in real time. It closes the gap between what should happen and what actually did.
Core · compounds
02
Operations intelligence: Sensors
Operations Intelligence captures what's happening in flight through conversation and process intelligence across customer contacts and orders, along with signals from returns and payment behavior. It flags churn risk, fraud, and rework before they cost you.
Core · compounds
01
Systems of record
Your commerce platform, order-management, CRM and loyalty, payments and marketplace systems—connected via APIs and standard rails, inside your cloud. Read from, not replaced.
Varies by retailer
Where the signal becomes memory
Learn about the Intelligent Context Framework
What we engineer for retail
From the shopper to the shelf
Where we put technology to work across retail—each powered by a Tech Services capability, and each behind a solution for grocers, specialty and fashion retailers, consumer brands, and marketplaces.
Customer care and service
46%–50% lower cost per contact
We deliver omnichannel care across voice, chat and social with conversation intelligence and agent assist that resolve issues the first time while maintaining CSAT through peak demand.
Sensor and operations intelligence
Commerce, sales, and clienteling
300% sales-performance lift | £130M driven
We orchestrate inside sales, clienteling and conversion across owned and marketplace channels, with propensity models and next-best offers built in.
Agentic orchestration
Personalization and content operations
37% lower content cost | per-asset cost down 90%+
We create personalized content, product descriptions and campaigns at catalog scale, brand-governed and generated from a single brief across segments, channels and languages.
Domain harness engineering
Returns, disputes, and order operations
2X faster merchant onboarding
We modernize returns, refunds, chargebacks and order operations, connecting them to your commerce and OMS platforms so agents can act safely end to end.
Systems, application and data engineering
Loyalty, retention, and trust
NPS 31 → 44 | FCR +30%
We strengthen loyalty, win-back and marketplace trust and safety with segmentation and sentiment models that improve retention and protect your brand across the customer base.
Context and knowledge engineering
Governed autonomy for retail
HITL → HOTL → Autonomous | audit-ready
We progress from HITL to HOTL to autonomous operations as trust is earned, with hard brand and compliance boundaries no agent can override and audit-ready decision traces.
Governed autonomy and run
The retail solutions this powers
The technology above runs behind our retail solutions, across segments. Explore the ones built for your business:
Customer Care
Commerce & Sales
Personalization & Content
Returns & Order Ops
Loyalty & Retention
Marketplace Trust & Safety
Trust & Compliance
Compliance and brand safety. By design.
We operate inside the regulatory and brand-safety frameworks that govern retail and commerce—built in from the start of every engagement, not audited at the end—with hard brand and compliance boundaries no agent can override and audit-ready decision traces at every layer.
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SOC 2 Type II
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ISO 27001
PCI DSS
ISO 9001
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GDPR · CCPA
WCAG · accessibility
Compliance, architected in
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Rules at the moment of action
Payment and data frameworks—PCI DSS, GDPR and CCPA—consumer-protection and advertising standards, marketplace trust-and-safety obligations (including the EU Digital Services Act) and accessibility (WCAG/ADA), encoded as guardrails inside the workflow.
Decision traceability
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Audit-ready by design
Every agent decision leaves an immutable trace of action, actor and evidence, and surfaces the reasoning that drove it—reconstructable for a brand, compliance or trust-and-safety review, by design.
Progressive trust
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Autonomy that’s earned
Human-in-the-loop for high-stakes brand and compliance calls, human-on-the-loop for monitored workflows, autonomous only where trust and performance are proven.
full-stack operator
Intelligence That Operates
Where it starts
Operating-model and AI diagnostic
Most engagements start with a diagnostic that frames the value at stake across the lifecycle before anything is built.
Explore consulting
The signal
Sensor and operations intelligence
The conversation, process and returns intelligence that flags churn, fraud and rework in flight—the signal behind every next-best action.
Explore the capability
How WE Engage
Transform, implement, and operate
Not a consulting engagement, not an outsourcing contract—a single motion from operating-model redesign to agentic operations at scale, under one roof and one contract, with outcomes underwritten.
Good questions to start with
How is this different from a scaled SI, an AI-native commerce player, or a CX-scale provider?
Scaled system integrators bring breadth, but generalist playbooks. AI-native retail and commerce players bring model horsepower you’re effectively renting. CX-scale providers bring seats, but not the domain IP or operating accountability to re-architect the operation. We bring 24 years of retail domain intelligence encoded as a harness, re-architect the operation for AI, and run it with outcomes underwritten—domain IP that compounds and stays portable, with no lock-in. Models commoditize; the retail judgment doesn’t.
Can you handle peak and seasonal volatility?
Yes—it’s where the operating system earns its keep. The harness, context and sensors let agents absorb seasonal spikes and returns surges autonomously, with human capacity reserved for the high-stakes contacts—holding cost-to-serve and CSAT through peak instead of staffing up and hoping.
How do you personalize at scale without losing brand control?
Brand voice and guidelines live in the harness as guardrails, so personalized content, product descriptions and campaigns generate at catalog scale—across segments, channels and languages—from a single brief, brand-governed and reviewable, never off-brand.
Do you build the AI models yourselves?
We don’t build foundation models from scratch. We select, fine-tune and evaluate the propensity, personalization, fraud and content models on your data as your data services partner—see AI Data Services—and orchestrate the models you already run inside the operating system.
What does an AI operating system mean for retail?
It means your care, commerce, returns and loyalty agents act on one customer-and-order context, your encoded merchandising and returns rules, and live signals—instead of disconnected tools. That’s what lets AI run the retail operation dependably and compound as your own intelligence.
TESTIMONIAL
Operators who changed how they run retail
We have come so far in this time and it's really down to all of your hard work. It's also worth pointing out that our competitors didn't make it onto any of the lists below. Thank you to everyone who has been involved in this journey of transformation.
You took over a significant backlog with zero experience of our business, right at the start of Retail Peak and Black Friday. You took control, spoke to customers without them having to wait. Being there for customers made a massive difference, taking us to a whole new level.
Managing our consumer experience is complex. The communications and the clarity we get from [Firstsource] is taking that complexity away. Through a simplified, harmonized approach, they have created a solution with a consistent methodology showing real benefits at its core.
INSIGHTS
Latest from the Firstsource team
Insights from the field, real operations, real outcomes, and perspectives from the people making it work in live operations.
CONTACT US
See where AI changes your cost and risk first
Start with a diagnostic across mortgage, lending, cards and fraud. We’ll frame the value at stake—and the first operation to re-architect—before you commit to anything further.