Build vs Buy in the Age of AI
TL;DR
Fuse Inventory, the inventory planning and purchasing platform for multichannel consumer brands, is now listed in Anthropic's Claude Connectors Directory as Ask Fuse. Fuse customers connect it in Claude in a few clicks, sign in with their Fuse account, and ask questions about stock levels, stockout risk, order recommendations, open purchase orders, vendor lead times, sales by channel, and inventory value. The connector is read-only, scoped to one company's data, and included on every Fuse plan. Since launch it has handled thousands of tool calls, and operators at fast-growing brands use it to build supplier lead-time and open-order dashboards in Claude without exporting a single spreadsheet.
Fuse Is Now in Claude's Connectors Directory
Fuse Inventory is now listed in Anthropic's Claude Connectors Directory. If your brand runs inventory in Fuse, you can connect it to Claude from the directory and ask your live inventory questions in plain English: what stocks out before the holidays, which POs are late, which vendor's lead times are slipping, how much cash is sitting in a warehouse.
The data already exists in Fuse. Until now, getting an answer out of it usually meant exporting a CSV, building a pivot table, and interpreting it. That is often an afternoon per question. With Ask Fuse, Claude pulls the answer from the same validated, multichannel source of truth your team plans from, and it can turn that answer into a chart, a table, or a dashboard in the same conversation.
We opened the connector to customers in August 2026. This post covers what it does, how brands are already using it, and how to set it up.
What the Fuse Connector Can Answer
Ask Fuse gives Claude eight read-only tools over one company's Fuse data. Each tool returns totals that cover every matching row, so a question like "what do we owe on open POs?" gets a complete number, not a sample.
|
Question you can ask |
What Fuse returns |
Tool |
|---|---|---|
|
Which SKUs stock out in the next 90 days, and what should I order? |
Stockout windows per SKU and channel pool, recommended POs with draft-by, place-by and ETA dates, and estimated cost |
get_order_recommendations |
|
What's arriving, when, and what's overdue? |
Every open PO line with ETA, quantity and cost, rolled up by date, SKU, warehouse and vendor; overdue lines flagged with days late |
get_upcoming_stock |
|
Which vendors are late, and are lead times getting worse? |
On-time percent, mean and p90 slip days per vendor, measured against the originally committed ETA, plus the current overdue book |
get_vendor_performance |
|
What do we have, where, and what is it worth? |
On-hand, available, inbound and reserved units by SKU and warehouse, valued at cost and at gross price |
get_stock_levels |
|
How much cash is tied up, and how much gross profit is at risk? |
Inventory value, open PO commitment by vendor and currency, a spend calendar by ETA, and gross profit at risk from predicted stockouts |
get_spend_and_cost_analysis |
|
What sold, by channel, against forecast? |
Units and revenue per SKU by channel and period, with Fuse's forecast and projection beside actuals |
get_sales_report |
|
What is this SKU made of, and what uses it? |
Bills of materials, components, bundles, variants, merged SKUs and fulfillment aliases |
understand_product_relations |
|
Find the right SKU |
Product search by SKU or name, with unit cost and price |
find_products |
Three design choices matter for anyone evaluating it:
- Read-only. Ask Fuse cannot create, edit or delete anything in your Fuse account
- Scoped to your company. You sign in with your Fuse account, and every answer comes from your company's data only
- Fuse does the math. Forecasts, stockout dates and order recommendations come from Fuse's planning engine. Claude reads and explains them; it does not invent them. When a number has limits (a forecast that ends before your horizon, a sales channel whose feed went quiet), the response says so
How Brands Are Using It
In its first six weeks, Ask Fuse handled thousands of tool calls. The single most-asked question is about the purchase-order book: about 6 in 10 calls ask what is on order, what is arriving, and what is late. Sales by channel (Shopify, Amazon, Target, Sephora, etc.) is second, at roughly 1 in 6.
A fast-growing health brand: supplier lead times, open orders and production plans as live dashboards
One of our fastest-growing customers is a health and wellness brand that sells through its own site, Amazon, and national retail chains. Its supply chain lead keeps Fuse as the team's system of record. The question everyone outside the supply chain team kept asking was simple to say and hard to answer: what's planned, what's on order, where is it, and how are suppliers performing?
Before the connector, answering that meant downloading data, pasting it into Excel, and building charts by hand. With Ask Fuse connected to Claude, the supply chain lead built a five-tab dashboard pulled straight from Fuse:
- Open orders across every vendor and destination, with product names beside SKU codes so non-ops colleagues can read it
- Production schedule comparing what was planned each week against what actually ran, so constrained bulk supply gets allocated deliberately between a major retail partner and other channels
- On order, in transit and planned inventory for every product, including draft POs. The view surfaced a ~$40k draft PO nobody could explain, which would otherwise have stayed buried
- Planned orders combining open and draft POs so Finance can see total future inventory commitments
- Supplier lead times from fully committed PO to receipt, trended per supplier
The lead-time view changed an internal debate. The team had been told stockouts were happening because sales kept rising. The data showed a second cause: several suppliers' lead times had stretched, so orders sized to sales were still arriving too late. One co-packer took 43 days to ship an Amazon replenishment that normally takes 18 to 20. The team now has an objective trend line to bring to supplier conversations, and a way to tell bad data entry apart from real supply chain deterioration.
"It was a very easy transition and fast follow for me to start building this." -- Supply chain lead, health and wellness brand
"The world's my oyster now that I have access to this data." -- Supply chain lead, health and wellness brand
Catching stale POs before they distort the numbers
A common pattern across newer users: someone notices on-hand looks wrong, asks Claude why, and gets a list of POs that were due weeks ago and never received. Fuse already flags passed ETAs in the product, but a single chart of every overdue PO, grouped by vendor, makes the cleanup obvious. Some teams go a step further and have Claude check vendor emails for shipment updates they forgot to enter.
Quick answers for finance and leadership
Finance leads and founders often open Fuse once a month and have to relearn where everything lives. With the connector they ask directly: how much do we still owe on open POs this quarter, how much inventory value sits in each warehouse, how much gross profit is at risk from stockouts in the next 90 days. The answer comes back in seconds, with the vendor and currency breakdown attached.
Why It Works: Claude Is Only as Smart as the Data Behind It
An AI assistant pointed at a pile of exports will give you confident answers built on stale or partial numbers. Ask Fuse works because the hard part already happened in Fuse: sales from Shopify, Amazon, wholesale and retail are consolidated, POs and shipments are tracked to the line, bills of materials roll up to components, and the forecast is maintained by your planners.
That is what operators get out of it:
- Answers instead of reports. The question you used to export for gets answered in the conversation, and Claude can draw the chart in the same step
- Every channel in one answer. DTC, Amazon, wholesale and retail come from one source of truth, so a stockout answer accounts for all of them
- Custom views without waiting on a roadmap. One customer built aggregate open-order and lead-time dashboards that Fuse's SKU-level screens did not show yet
- The why behind the number. Claude can explain why Fuse recommends a reorder quantity: the stockout window, the lead time, the place-by date
- Access for people who don't live in Fuse. Finance, founders and sales leaders get answers without learning the interface
- Safe by default. Read-only access, scoped to your company, signed in with your own Fuse account
How to Connect Fuse to Claude
Setup takes a few minutes and needs no engineering. It works on Claude Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.
- In Claude, open Customize > Connectors and search the directory for Fuse
- Click Connect on Ask Fuse
- Sign in with your Fuse account email and approve access
- Ask your first question
On Claude Team and Enterprise, an organization owner adds the connector once under Organization settings > Connectors, then each person connects with their own Fuse login. If you prefer to add it manually, the server URL is https://app.fuseinventory.com/api/mcp. Full steps are in the help center guide.
Good first questions to try:
- Which SKUs will stock out in the next 90 days, and when do I need to place the PO?
- Show me every overdue PO grouped by vendor, with days late and dollars outstanding
- Chart each supplier's lead-time slip over the last 12 months
- How much inventory value is in each warehouse, at cost?
- Compare last quarter's sales by channel against forecast
- How much gross profit is at risk from predicted stockouts, and which SKUs drive it?
FAQ
What is Fuse Inventory? Fuse Inventory is an inventory planning, purchasing and demand forecasting platform for fast-growing multichannel consumer brands in beauty, CPG, supplements, food and beverage, apparel and home goods. It sits between spreadsheets and a full ERP like NetSuite, and connects to Shopify, Amazon, QuickBooks, NetSuite, 3PLs and other systems to keep one source of truth for stock, POs, forecasts and cost.
What is Ask Fuse? Ask Fuse is Fuse Inventory's MCP connector for Claude. It lets Claude read a company's live Fuse data and answer questions about stock levels, stockout risk, order recommendations, purchase orders, vendor performance, sales and inventory cost.
Is Fuse listed in Anthropic's Claude Connectors Directory? Yes. Search for Fuse in Claude under Customize > Connectors.
Can Claude change data in Fuse? No. The connector is read-only. It cannot create, edit or delete purchase orders, products, forecasts or any other record.
Does Claude generate the forecast? No. Fuse's planning engine produces the forecast, stockout dates and order recommendations. Claude reads them and explains them.
Is my data used to train AI models? Fuse does not use customer data to train AI models, and the connection is encrypted and scoped to your company.
Which Claude plans work with the Fuse connector? Claude Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise.
Does it cost extra? Read access is included on every Fuse plan.
Do I need to be a Fuse customer? Yes. The connector answers from your company's Fuse data, so your inventory needs to be in Fuse first. Fuse typically gets brands live in weeks.
Who is the Fuse connector a good fit for? Ops, supply chain, planning and finance teams at consumer brands selling across DTC, Amazon, wholesale and retail, with hundreds to thousands of SKUs, multi-level BOMs or bundles, and overseas suppliers with long lead times. It is not built for single-channel micro-brands or enterprises already standardized on a full ERP.
Does it work with ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini? Claude is supported today. Other assistants are on the roadmap.
See It on Your Own Data
Ask Fuse only works on data that lives in Fuse, and that's the point: the answers are as good as the inventory system behind them. If you're a Fuse customer, connect it today from the Claude directory. If you're still planning in spreadsheets and want to see what your inventory would say if you could ask it, get a demo.
Tags:
Fuse Inventory
10/9/26, 5:36 PM
10/9/26, 5:36 PM
