Is understaffing killing your revenue? Learn how to calculate the cost of “not doing” and build a winning business case for AI automation at an NRF 2026 workshop led by Workday's Josh Secrest.
Written by Josh Secrest, Workday's Head of Paradox Frontline Field Marketing and Customer Advocacy
In retail today, companies buy artificial intelligence tools to solve urgent business challenges, not just to acquire new technology. When executives scrutinize technology spend, they want measurable outcomes tied to revenue, cost savings, and efficiency rather than product pitches. HR teams responsible for frontline hiring are uniquely positioned to demonstrate this financial ROI because their work is high volume, administratively heavy, and directly tied to customer experience.
Drawing on my experience leading global talent acquisition at McDonald's and Abercrombie & Fitch, I have long championed the transformation of high-volume, frontline hiring. I have seen firsthand that getting the right people into customer-facing roles quickly is a revenue-impacting imperative, not just an HR problem.
Frontline hiring is business critical, but it’s also the perfect space for AI support: It’s high volume, filled with repetitive administrative tasks for our managers (screening and scheduling applicants, onboarding paperwork), and directly tied to revenue and customer experience. When stores (or distribution centers) are understaffed, lines get longer, stock replenishment slows, sales drop, service erodes, and turnover rises—all of which has an effect on cost and revenue.
When stores are understaffed, lines get longer, stock replenishment slows, sales drop, service erodes, and turnover rises.
That's why I'm conducting a hands-on workshop titled “Building the Business Case for AI in Talent Acquisition.” This session is designed to give retail leaders the tools to make an ROI-driven case for how automating, expediting, and simplifying hiring can drive top- and bottom-line results.
Here is a look at what we’ll cover.
We have to stop viewing time-to-hire as simply an efficiency metric. For a high-volume business, speed is a revenue metric.
The math of understaffing: Consider this benchmark: Many retailers still take 21 or more days to fill frontline roles. Contrast that with high-performing peers using AI that have now compressed hiring cycles in store and distribution center locations to two to four days through automation—a dramatic acceleration that has had a multimillion-dollar impact on retail operations.
We have to stop viewing time-to-hire as simply an efficiency metric. For a high-volume business, speed is a revenue metric.
What does that look like in dollars? Let’s say a location leaves $500 per day in revenue on the table due to understaffing (missed sales due to slower flow through or conversion), a 21-day vacancy would equate to $10,500 in unrealized revenue (or minimally overtime costs). Hiring candidates in just three days recovers 18 productive days—roughly $9,000 in revenue per hire. That’s not an HR vanity metric, that’s a business metric CFOs understand.
The operational impact: After analyzing over 1 billion hiring interactions, Paradox data has seen companies using AI reduce time-to-hire by more than 75% and save individual store managers five-plus hours per week.
I’ll walk attendees through mapping out how being understaffed leads directly to slower service, poor customer experiences, and manager burnout—which, in turn, drives up future turnover costs.
Speed drives quality in frontline: Even more compelling is the type of candidate hired by retailers hiring faster—they stay longer. That means fewer “quick quits,” or hires who leave before 30 days—and often cost more than the value they created for the business.
But how does hiring faster improve quality? With candidates applying to more than 20 jobs in a week (with over 52% applying on nights and weekends), retailers who can screen and schedule candidates for interviews first (automation ensures candidates hear back within minutes of the application being submitted, 24/7) often win the best candidates. (“Best” here might mean best shift/schedule fit or previous retail experience). By leveraging automation, it’s like giving retail managers a 24/7 recruiter to get to the best candidates first.
The automation that saves our managers hours per week also saves candidates time.
How do candidates feel about AI in the hiring process? They love it. (We ask them.) We see a positive satisfaction rating above 96%. The automation that saves our managers hours per week also saves candidates time.
Candidates can apply on their smartphone in over 100 languages in under three minutes, then hear back and schedule an interview within minutes. They then can get answers to their questions in real time and even reschedule their interview time if life comes up.
I've written hundreds of business cases for organizations from all types of industries and have seen what it takes to move a CFO (or other executive decision maker) from “red pen” to “green light.”
We’ill clearly distinguish between:
Hard savings: Direct budget line impacts (e.g., removing redundant job board spend, reducing overtime hours).
Operational efficiencies: Quantifiable manager productivity gains (e.g., giving every store manager back five-plus hours per week).
Strategic alignment: Making sure proposals tie into the company's biggest priorities—whether that’s a new product launch, a push for sustainability, or, most commonly in retail, the high-volume holiday staffing blitz.
We'll use a specific workbook design to stress-test attendees’ current state and map their future automation strategy.
Budget stress-testing: We’ll run exercises to calculate how leaders can meet ambitious hiring targets, even if budgets continue to decrease.
Automation tiers: I’ll demonstrate how to segment an organization’s workforce to create different hiring workflows with different levels of automation per job type. This will clarify why frontline and customer-facing roles might be ripe for 95% automation, while corporate roles might more realistically aim for 60%.
Finally, I’ll demonstrate why a conversational approach matters so much to the bottom line.
Traditional hiring funnels lose candidates to clunky logins and non-mobile forms. With conversational AI (text-to-apply technology and 24/7 chat), we’ve seen conversion rates triple for customers. That's not a soft metric; that's maximizing the applicant pool and reducing cost per applicant by cutting job advertising spend by more than half.
Come see “Building the Business Case for AI in Talent Acquisition” at NRF 2026 on Monday, January 12, 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., and stop by the Workday booth (booth 3) for a Paradox demo.
The retail industry is evolving rapidly, driven by five key trends, including a deep focus on personalization. For retailers to thrive and succeed in today's ever-changing market, they must embrace these business-critical shifts.
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