The Retail Imperative: Data, AI and the New Consumer Reality

Retailers used to worry about whether customers would migrate online. Today they fret about whether their data can keep up. From New York to LA, the talk at ETail Connect has been less about footfall and more about data gravity, the invisible force that pulls every decision, from promotion design to supply-chain financing, towards the numbers.

1 | Data: the bloodstream that still clots

“We’re building a lake where everything can live,” confessed one retail CTO, echoing peers who are still draining ancient silos. Legacy ERP tags the same shopper three different ways; marketing calls her “lapsed”, stores hail her as “VIP”. Until the lake flows, the promise of one-to-one retail remains theoretical.

2 | AI: from pilot to profit

Generative AI is no longer a cocktail-hour curiosity. Deep-learning layers are already rewriting product copy on the fly and serving real-time, hyper-personalised ads that have lifted revenue “by 57 per cent on lower CAC”, according to one presenter. The message: start with clean first-party data, plug in modular models, and measure ruthlessly. 

3 | Unified commerce: stitching the channels

Boards now talk of a single roadmap that binds merchandising, marketing and systems architecture. Rip-and-replace fantasies are out; pragmatic component swaps are in. One apparel group is rebuilding its stack “one micro-service at a time”, even forcing store associates to surrender customer numbers buried in personal phones.

4 | The fierce economics of acquisition & LTV

Sixty per cent of many e-commerce revenues still come from new customers each year. Yet the top 10 per cent of shoppers often drive more than half of sales. Smart operators therefore target “look-alikes” of their highest spenders, identified by first-basket value or premium categories, while relentlessly harvesting email and SMS consent to double the odds of a second purchase.

5 | Marketing measurement grows up

Return-on-ad-spend is being demoted from North Star to lagging indicator. Growth teams now triangulate incrementality tests, media-mix models and hard contribution to the P&L. “What’s the ROI of this feature?” has become a gating question for every tech sprint.

6 | Amazon & the age of retail media

If data is oil, Amazon is OPEC. Brands are mining the platform’s free dashboards, stock analytics, market-basket insights, demographics—to shave fulfilment fees and design smarter cross-sells. Amazon’s own ad sales jumped a fifth to $12.8 bn in Q2 2024, underscoring the gravitational pull of its closed-loop audience data (Financial Times).

7 | Macro headwinds, micro indulgences

Rising tariffs and commodity prices are squeezing margins, while US sentiment surveys point to cooler discretionary spend. Retailers are responding with value-led messaging, think reading glasses before sunglasses, yet consumers still crave small luxuries, swapping Provence for Florida rather than cancelling holidays outright.

8 | Culture eats transformation for breakfast

Technology is the easy part; the grind is cross-functional discipline. Operators who favour “shiny new things” over process, talent and empathy rarely sustain gains. Women, who influence 85 per cent of household purchases, must be centred in both data sets and decision rooms.

Additional Sources:

1. Interactive Mindmap

2. Podcast on event themes

Boardroom Takeaways

• Build the lake, resolve the identity. Clean, connected data is prerequisite #1.

• Pilot Gen-AI to reduce creative fatigue. Ruthless remove high admin high frequency workflows to empower creative store executions

• Draft a customer plan next to the merch and financial plans. Growth lives at the overlap.

• Exploit platform data exhaustively, especially Amazon’s, for  revenue growing insights and reducing fulfilment costs.

• Narrate value in an age of frugality, but leave room for ‘treat yourself’.

• Mind the culture: cross-functional KPIs and a diverse leadership table outperform dashboards alone.