REBUILDING RETAIL: DATA INITIATIVES TO CREATE COMMERCIAL UPLIFT

Architecting for the Age of Agentic Commerce 

As agents are forecasted to increasingly influence discovery, pricing, and purchasing, retailers must support autonomous decisioning without destabilising core operations. The challenge is bridging legacy ERP, POS, and CRM environments with AI-ready, real-time architecture while avoiding further tool sprawl and loss of control. Data leaders from Shiseido Group to Adidas share how they are focused on sequencing modernisation, defining ownership, and ensuring agentic capabilities sit on trusted data foundations that drive commercial uplift, not operational risk. 

Activating Customer Insight for Loyalty, Personalisation, and Growth 

Retailers have no shortage of customer data, but turning insight into consistent action remains difficult. Signals are fragmented across store, digital, loyalty, and partner ecosystems, limiting relevance and speed. Discover roadmaps from QVC, PureGym and others to build unified, consented customer views that enable near real-time decisioning, supporting personalisation, pricing, and retail media monetisation, while delivering measurable impact on loyalty, conversion, and margin. 

Governance, Risk, & Trust in the Age of AI 

As AI moves closer to customers and the P&L, governance can no longer be either an afterthought or a blocker. Retailers must manage bias, accountability, data quality, and explainability across complex, federated organisations. The challenge tackled successfully by The Cotswold Company, Ocado Logistics and many others, is establishing pragmatic governance, embedded into workflows and data products, that protects trust and compliance while enabling teams to move fast and scale AI responsibly.