What Is iVendNext AI Gateway?

iVendNext AI Gateway is a module that connects your iVendNext instance directly to AI assistants — tools like Claude Desktop and ChatGPT that your team may already be using. Once connected, anyone in your organisation can ask questions about your business data in plain English and receive accurate, real-time answers drawn from your live iVendNext system.

There is no new application to open, no new screen to learn, and no report to configure. You ask a question the same way you would ask a colleague — and the AI responds with information sourced directly from your inventory, sales, purchasing, customer, and operations data.

This is what makes iVendNext AI Gateway different from anything that came before it.

Licensing note: iVendNext AI Gateway is licensed separately as a module. It does not include a subscription to any AI assistant. To use the Gateway, you must have your own active subscription to a compatible AI assistant — such as Claude (Anthropic) or ChatGPT (OpenAI) — obtained directly from the respective provider. The cost of that subscription is not covered by your iVendNext AI Gateway licence.

The Problem With Traditional Business Reporting

Most business management platforms — including iVendNext — come with powerful reporting tools. You can build dashboards, run reports, drill down into documents, and filter by date, location, or category. For users who work in the system every day, these tools are invaluable.

But for many people in a retail organisation, that is not how their day works.

A store director who wants to know whether footfall converted into revenue last Saturday does not want to open a reporting module, select the right report, configure the date range, apply store filters, and export the result. A buying manager who wants to know which suppliers are consistently late does not want to build a pivot table. A managing director who wants a high-level view of how the business performed last quarter does not want to spend forty minutes navigating screens to assemble that picture.

The information exists. The obstacle is access — the gap between the person who has the question and the system that holds the answer.

iVendNext AI Gateway closes that gap entirely.

How It Works

iVendNext AI Gateway operates as an MCP server — a standardised connection layer that allows AI assistants to communicate securely with iVendNext on behalf of an authenticated user.

In practical terms, this means the following: when a user connects their AI assistant to iVendNext AI Gateway and asks a question, the AI translates that natural language question into a structured request, sends it to iVendNext, retrieves the relevant data, and returns the answer in plain language — all within seconds.

The user does not need to know which module holds the data, which report to run, or how to filter the results. They simply ask.

"What were my top ten selling items last month?" "How much stock do I have of our best-selling summer range across all warehouses?" "Which customers haven't placed an order in the last 60 days?"

Each of these questions is answered by the AI pulling live data from iVendNext — the same data a trained user would find by navigating the application, but delivered in seconds through a conversational interface.

What Data Can You Access?

iVendNext AI Gateway provides access to the full breadth of your iVendNext data. This includes:

Sales and retail performance — transaction totals, revenue by store or channel, average transaction values, units per transaction, product performance, and promotion results.

Inventory and stock — stock on hand across warehouses, stock in transit, items below reorder level, slow-moving or non-moving stock, and stock valuation.

Purchasing and supplier management — open purchase orders, overdue deliveries, supplier performance, goods receipts, and landed costs.

Customers and accounts — customer purchase history, account balances, overdue receivables, and customer segmentation by spend or frequency.

Operations and workflows — pending approvals, document statuses, workflow queues, and outstanding tasks across the business.

The Gateway does not distinguish between modules. If the data is in iVendNext and the user has permission to see it, they can ask about it.