The ZEOS innovation roadmap: Why execution limits growth
Digital commerce still offers major growth opportunities, but profitable growth is getting harder as margins tighten and operational complexity increases. Success now depends on execution across the full journey, from funding and product launch to channel expansion, fulfilment and inventory placement.
At Zalando Partner Day 2026, VP of Technology and Services Luis Ribeiro presented ZEOS’s ‘Innovation Roadmap’ to explain why success now depends on execution.
A connected growth system
Instead of a linear value chain, we are building a connected growth system where improvements compound across each stage. This system unites ZEOS, SCAYLE, and Tradebyte capabilities into one intelligent engine, removing friction between your strategy and execution.
Funding production early
Growth starts long before the first sale. One major constraint for brands is working capital: demand may already exist, but cash leaves months before customer revenue comes in. Access to capital remains constrained, with SME lending in 2024 remaining 4% below 2022 levels, and over 80% of fashion executives cite capital efficiency as their top priority. ZEOS Capital helps close that gap by combining a brand’s broader financial picture with relevant Zalando performance data. We are introducing asset-based lending: a revolving credit line secured against inventory in our network, where borrowing is linked to stock value and repayment is linked to sales.
Accelerating time-to-online
Once inventory is funded, every day offline shortens the selling window. Traditional content production can take 6–8 weeks, with shoots, editing and channel adaptation slowing launches.
We offer two ways to accelerate this process:
ZEOS Content Services provides a fully managed service that combines physical photo production with generative AI.
SCAYLE Studios gives your internal teams a SaaS-based application to use generative AI for content creation.
At Zalando, we transformed our content creation from zero generative AI to more than 90% in 12 months. These tools also increase conversion rates. Adding a product video to a kids' item, for example, increases conversion by 3% to 4%.
Smart channel expansion
Reaching customers across channels often brings an onboarding tax: product mapping, technical work and disconnected systems. Tradebyte removes that friction.
Smart Mapping: AI transforms raw product data into channel-ready listings in seconds across 90+ European marketplaces.
Single integration: Expose inventory instantly without multiplying operational tax or technical overhead per channel.
TB.360 growth steering: Delivers benchmarking, profitability insights, and actionable AI recommendations on where to invest next.
Intelligent replenishment
Once brands expand across channels, inventory planning becomes a major margin risk. Stocking out of fast-moving products leads to over-correcting, which results in excess stock and markdowns. The ZEOS Replenishment Engine uses live Zalando demand signals powered by 60M+ shopper demand signals across the Zalando network. It automatically deducts customer returns in-transit from reorders to avoid overstocking and adapts recommendations to the fashion lifecycle to protect margins. In pilots, the Replenishment Engine increased Demand Fill Rate by 28 percentage points and reduced Overstock Rate by 70%. Soon, the Replenishment Engine will be available across all your marketplaces and channels.
Integrating your AI agents
Software developers spend less time coding today and more time working with AI agents. We believe this transformation will affect every role in the industry.
The ZEOS Agent Integration Layer lets you bring your own agents into our ecosystem. You can securely connect your existing tools to ZEOS data and capabilities. We will release this by the end of October with three core capabilities:
Return order tracking allows agents to query the real-time status of return shipments.
Data analysis allows your agents to consume and analyse standard reports.
Automated return to merchant generates proposals based on stock availability and automates the process upon approval.
By connecting digital tools directly to our physical network, agents can move from insight to execution. The brands that win in agentic commerce will not be the loudest — they will be the most trustworthy to machines and the most reliable for people.
