Most retailers still expect to increase AI investment, report finds

Most retailers are still adding AI to their carts.

A survey from customer data platform Amperity found that 58% of retailers expect to increase AI investments in the next 12 months. And 26% of the 1,000 retail professionals polled also believe that AI will increase their organization’s headcount rather than slashing it (20%).

But the numbers also show that some retailers may be facing a familiar struggle. Like other adoption reports find, dabbling with AI experimentation is easy (a third of respondents said their companies are either still in this stage or not using AI at all), and regular use around the office is also doable (two-thirds said their orgs used it at least weekly). But full-scale implementations? That can sometimes be more elusive (only 16% said their businesses had fully adopted AI across multiple business units).

Retailers are also perhaps warier about using AI in customer-facing applications—only 43% of respondents said their organizations were doing so.

“This survey highlights a pivotal shift in retail: AI is moving decisively from experimentation to scaled execution,” Tapan Patel, research director at IDC, said in a news release tied to the report. “Retailers who integrate AI into core workflows—across supply chain, merchandising, and engagement—are setting the new standards for customer experience in an increasingly dynamic market.”

Respondents said the top challenges for their companies included the high cost of AI tools, limited technical expertise, and lack of integration across systems. Around 45% said employees at their workplace were getting comprehensive training around AI.

Greg Buzek, an analyst at IHL, previously told Retail Brew that despite the “brutal” economics of adopting AI in retail, successfully incorporating GenAI “comes down to how much experience you have with traditional AI and machine learning in your company.”

Top areas where retailers are using AI spanned sales (52%), marketing (49%), and customer support (47%). Some of their top-priority use cases were predictive analytics, customer segmentation, chatbots or virtual assistants, improving data quality, personalization, and content creation.

“Retailers are adopting AI in droves—especially in sales, marketing, and customer support—but they’re often finding the tools expensive and difficult to implement,” Amperity CEO Tony Owens wrote in the report. “Brands are hesitant to deploy them in the customer-facing applications that have a direct business impact on growth and the bottom line.”