Retail executives are largely aligned on one point: Artificial intelligence is no longer experimental, but is central to how retailers expect to drive growth, improve customer experience, and build more resilient operations.

• AI platform-driven retail ecommerce sales will grow 278.1% this year to reach $20.57 billion, according to EMARKETER's December 2025 forecast.

However, new research from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) suggests that while ambition is high, execution remains uneven, and often superficial.

TCS' "Global Retail Outlook Key Findings Report" found that as AI has become a boardroom priority, most retailers are still deploying narrow, task-based tools rather than embedding AI into enterprise-wide decision-making.

Autonomy's edge

Retail leaders increasingly view AI as a cornerstone of future success, ranking generative and agentic AI among top enablers across strategic priorities. Still, progress toward true autonomy is limited.

• Only 24% of retailers say they currently use AI for autonomous decision-making, and 85% have not planned or started implementing multi-agent systems, according to TCS.
• 18% of senior retail executives worldwide say their retail companies/organizations have implemented agentic AI, according to March 2025 data from Capgemini.

Instead, adoption skews toward customer-facing tools. About 51% of retailers say AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants are their top AI-led initiative for the near term, making them the most frequently cited deployment, per TCS. That imbalance highlights a broader pattern: Retailers are comfortable experimenting at the edges, but far more cautious about handing decision authority to machines.

The result is a widening gap between AI’s perceived importance and its measurable impact. The industry is still early in moving from “assistive” AI toward systems that can sense, decide, and act across functions.

Growth agenda

That gap becomes more pronounced when retailers’ business priorities are compared with their AI investments. Driving profitable growth is the most frequently cited mission-critical objective, selected by 40% of respondents, followed by improving customer experience and loyalty (31%) and building supply chain agility and resiliency (26%), according to TCS' report.

• While chatbots and virtual assistants may improve service efficiency, they could be unlikely to unlock new revenue streams or materially expand margins on their own.

Retailers that do focus explicitly on growth point to more operationally embedded levers. Among those prioritizing profitable growth, 42% plan to implement AI-driven dynamic pricing to optimize margins in real time, 32% aim to expand retail media networks to monetize first-party data, and 31% cite strategic partnerships for adjacent services such as financial products or insurance.

For retail leaders, growth-oriented AI is less about surface-level engagement and more about pricing intelligence, inventory efficiency, and data monetization.

Leaders operationalize AI

TCS draws a sharp distinction between “Pacesetters,” defined as companies with the strongest financial performance since 2022, and “Followers.” The divide is not access to AI, but how deeply it’s embedded into core operations.

Pacesetters are consistently more likely to deploy AI in areas tied directly to profit and execution. For example,

Retail leaders who want to win in 2026 will find ways to scale up their AI initiatives and swiftly embed them into their operations.

TCS' report found that 46% of companies with the strongest financial performance since 2022 use AI for inventory and demand scheduling, compared with 38% of other companies.

• Workforce planning and scheduling shows a similar gap (40% versus 32%), as does AI-driven dynamic pricing (37% versus 30%).

Rather than treating AI as a collection of isolated tools, those who want to win will connect demand generation, pricing, and fulfillment into integrated decision loops.

Personalization is becoming an enterprise capability.

Personalization remains a high priority, but the way retailers approach it is changing. Rather than relying solely on segmentation and campaigns, many are investing in foundational data infrastructure.

Among retailers prioritizing hyper-personalization, 34% are building comprehensive customer data platforms to enable 360-degree customer views, while 33% are deploying AI to infer unstated customer needs from behavioral patterns and contextual signals.

Some retailers are already blending digital intelligence with physical execution.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on being digitally enabled, successfully blending our online presence with our physical store network to deliver a seamless shopping experience for our customers," said David Wood, CEO of Wickes, in the report.

The strategic shift is toward routing customer intelligence beyond marketing and into assortment planning, pricing, and store operations.

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