Workday Video: How Retail Can Leverage AI’s Potential for Major Gains

Retail organisations have already endured years of disruption, but continued transformation is necessary to thrive. Today, amid growing consumer expectations, a tight labour market, and razor-thin margins, retailers must improve organisational resilience and agility to accelerate innovation, hire and retain the right talent, and invest in growth. 

Speaking at Workday Rising EMEA in Barcelona, industry leaders discuss how AI will change every facet of retail, and explain the steps required to realise its potential and drive future success.

Join us in a discussion on what 2024 holds, and how retailers can boost agility to respond to shifting customer and market demands.

Key insights:

• AI will impact every element of retail. “We see a lot of exciting trends, like CX innovation and supply chain optimisation but the real trend is artificial intelligence,” says Laurent Homeyer, a Workday strategic industry advisor. “It’s foundational technology that will touch every part of a retailer’s value chain, from procurement to pricing strategies to supply chain optimisation down to frontline worker engagement.”

• Retailers have a major opportunity to improve the employee experience while driving efficiency. “Retail is a people business,” notes Daniel Bobroff, co-founder of Intawear, a digital company that lets gamers buy fashion for their in-game characters. Therefore, employers need to do far more to provide workers with “technology that can reduce the monotonous, tedious and often error-prone jobs that take up so much of their time.”

• To realise AI’s benefits, organisations must modernise and collaborate. One of retail’s biggest challenges is the prevalence of “legacy code within organisations, making the introduction of new initiatives and the testing of new opportunities really difficult,” Bobroff says. “One of the other challenges is that operational teams and customer experience teams are often divided by silos, and that has to change.”

• Modernisation should include investments in the digital back office. Why? Retailers “need to be able to leverage technology to be able to forecast what could happen and align your organisation, processes, and skills to be able to grab the opportunities,” Homeyer says.