How retail and consumer goods leaders empower their workforces with AI agents

Retail and consumer goods organizations face a multitude of challenges. Margins are shrinking. Labor shortages are frequent. Customers expect more personalization, speed, and seamless experiences than ever before. Against this backdrop, it’s tempting to view AI as a cure-all: more AI, fewer problems. But the reality is more complex.

“Gartner^® predicts that 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027.”¹ While AI technology is transformative, adoption alone does not guarantee desired results. It’s important to have a plan that meets your organization’s unique needs, goals, and capabilities.

Studies show how finding the right strategic lever for AI is becoming table stakes for retail organizations. By 2030, personal AI shopper agents could influence over half of global consumer spending, having a massive effect on marketing strategies.² Retailers who fail to adapt, risk being left behind.

How do we resolve this paradox? The answer lies in specificity. Success depends on understanding where AI agents can drive impact in retail and consumer goods organizations, mapping innovative opportunities to the most pressing challenges, and measuring results with rigor. Starting with clear use cases tied to real business outcomes. This is how small proof points evolve into large cross-organizational impact.

The new demands of retail and consumer goods marketers

On the customer-facing side of retail and consumer goods, the pressure to deliver is intense. Chief marketing officers (CMOs), loyalty leaders, and customer experience executives are asked to orchestrate hyper-personalized campaigns while also delivering seamless support throughout the customer journey. Communications, pricing, promotions, placement (brand engagement), post-purchase care—each of these touchpoints require speed, consistency, and delight. Yet in many organizations, insights are fragmented, campaign cycles are slow, and service costs are rising.

This is where agentic AI can create a flywheel. Consider marketing campaigns. With AI analyzing consumer data for insights, generating creative content variations, and orchestrating campaigns, marketing executives can move from static plans to dynamic, always-on engagement. These same systems can feed reports to marketers managing campaign effectiveness, closing the loop between insights and agility.

With the agility offered by AI, other customer-facing roles are also enabled. Customer service leaders are empowered with insights on customers who have interacted with the brand, and frontline workers are empowered with faster time to knowledge and service.

Retailers such as Albert Heijn, featured in our new e-book, show how forward-thinking retailers are already deploying AI on the store floor, to help employees serve customers faster and more effectively.

Operations as a growth driver

If marketing and customer service comprise the front face of retail, operations and merchandising are its backbone. A delayed shipment, a stockout, a mistimed promotion aren’t operational issues; they’re revenue leaks.

AI agents reframe operations, from support to strategy. For chief operating officers (COOs) and supply chain and logistics leaders, AI agents can forecast demand, sense disruptions, and adjust supply chains before problems escalate. This goes beyond efficiency into protection of revenue, risk management, and brand trust. For merchandising executives, AI agent capabilities enable localized assortments, dynamic pricing, and promotion planning that adjusts in near real-time. What once took weeks of manual coordination can now be automated to maximize sell-through and reduce carrying costs.

The cumulative effects are profound. Agentic AI brings agility to the functions that keep retail running, turning them into engines of competitive differentiation. This example from Pets at Home illustrates how retailers are applying tools to match demand with precision, protect margins, and optimize execution across stores and channels.

Combining your insights to out-innovate at scale

Beyond day-to-day execution, the consumer goods industry faces another pressing challenge: the speed of innovation. Product lifecycles are shrinking. Consumer preferences shift quickly. Data is fragmented and siloed. For research and development (R&D) leaders, this creates inefficiencies that delay launches and increase costs.

AI agents have the potential to rewire this process. By unifying consumer insights, market trends, and operational data, they can accelerate product development cycles and empower collaboration. Manufacturing leaders gain predictive visibility into bottlenecks. Product officers can simulate demand and orchestrate workflows across teams. The net effect is faster time-to-market, lower risk of failed launches, and greater alignment between what consumers want and what companies can deliver.

Estée Lauder used AI to unify datasets and accelerate innovation. It underscores how agentic AI can serve as a catalyst for growth beyond the core of retail operations.

Where will you pilot agentic AI?

AI agents aren’t a one-size-fits-all answer, but embracing AI agents today will help future-proof your organization and empower functions across your retail and consumer goods businesses. Its greatest impact emerges when part of a broader strategy, deployed against specific challenges, and with clear measures of success. Whether enabling agentic shopping experiences or efficient operations, retail and consumer goods companies that take advantage of marketing, customer service, merchandising, operations, and R&D opportunities to embrace AI can reimagine these functions as growth drivers for the business.

---

¹Gartner^® Press Release, Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027, June 25, 2025. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark and IT Symposium/Xpo is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

²Cognizant, Consumers Who Embrace AI Could Drive $4.4 Trillion in Spending Over Five Years, 2025. 

The post How retail and consumer goods leaders empower their workforces with AI agents appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Source: Microsoft Industry Blog