AI transforms unified commerce from connected systems into intelligent engines that predict, personalize, and adapt in real-time.
Two transformative forces are converging to redefine retail: Artificial Intelligence and Unified Commerce. While AI commands industry attention as the catalyst for personalization and predictive capabilities, unified commerce provides the foundation that determines whether these innovations can deliver at scale.
These forces are interdependent. AI without unified infrastructure becomes fragmented across disconnected systems. Unified commerce without AI remains a static framework that cannot adapt or learn. Personalization engines require complete customer data to function effectively, just as unified platforms rely on AI to turn integrated information into actionable insights.
The breakthrough occurs when they work together. Together, AI and unified commerce transform raw data into intelligent, actionable insights. This combination enables more responsive operations, smarter decision-making, and consistently better customer experiences.
Retail’s Value Equation: Growth and Gaps
Growth: The business case for AI and unified commerce is no longer theoretical. It is proven in the numbers. According to Incisiv’s 2025 Unified Commerce in Speciality Retail, retailers with advanced unified commerce maturity achieve 23% faster inventory turnover, 22% lower acquisition costs and 96% order promise accuracy, Early AI deployments show similar impact. An Accenture study reports a 25% lift in marketing ROI, while BCG research estimates up to a 20% increase in sales. Both forces create measurable returns on their own, but their full power comes when applied together.
Gaps: While the growth potential is clear, significant challenges remain in realizing AI’s full impact in retail. One of the biggest barriers to scaling retail AI is the lack of integration across systems. According to Amperity’s 2025 State of AI in Retail Survey, 33.6% of retailers cite this as a top challenge. This fragmentation drives up IT costs, increases human error, and delays decision making. Today, unified commerce connects systems but often stops short of intelligence. AI can close this gap by transforming integration into foresight, making data predictive and actions adaptive.
The perception that retail AI is overhyped comes less from its potential and more from its effectiveness being constrained by fragmented foundations. When unified commerce creates a flexible, future ready base, AI can move from pilots and isolated wins into enterprise scale impact. The opportunity is not just to close gaps but to build the architecture that allows AI to deliver its full value.
The Intelligence Layer: How AI Elevates Unified Commerce
Unified commerce brings order to retail's complexity by connecting systems, channels, and data. But connection without intelligence is limited. It tells retailers what happened, not what's about to happen. AI provides that missing intelligence layer, transforming unified commerce from a static backbone into a living, adaptive engine.
Hyper-Personalization at Scale Unified commerce lays the groundwork by consolidating customer data from every channel into a single, consistent profile. AI leverages this foundation to deliver experiences that move far beyond traditional segmentation. By continuously learning from browsing patterns, purchase history, and interaction preferences, it can anticipate customer needs before they’re even expressed. The result is dynamic product recommendations that adapt in real time, pricing strategies that reflect individual value perception, and campaigns that resonate across every channel. Whether customers engage through an app, a website, or a physical store, AI ensures every touchpoint feels uniquely tailored to their journey.
Predictive Operations and Inventory Intelligence AI elevates inventory and pricing from reactive scrambling to strategic foresight. By synthesizing historical sales data, seasonal patterns, external factors like weather events, and real-time demand signals, it accurately forecasts needs across multiple geographies and channels. This predictive capability enables proactive stock rebalancing to eliminate shortages while reducing excess inventory, simultaneously optimizing pricing based on demand fluctuations, competitive landscape, and individual customer price sensitivity to transform inventory from a cost center into a revenue driver.
Customer Intelligence Unified commerce connects customer and product data into a single source of truth, giving store associates and service teams access to insights that were once siloed. AI enhances this connection by surfacing contextual intelligence in real time such as browsing history, past purchases, and even items left in online carts so associates can make recommendations that feel personal rather than scripted. Service teams can instantly retrieve product details, warranty information, and tailored resolution paths, enabling faster and more relevant support. The outcome is data informed interactions that strengthen trust, enhance satisfaction, and increase conversion without adding friction.
Seamless Cross-Channel Orchestration Unified commerce creates the foundation for AI to coordinate customer journeys across every channel. AI orchestrates complex, multi- touchpoint interactions that span digital and physical environments without requiring manual coordination. It seamlessly reserves products across locations based on customer preferences and proximity, triggers loyalty offers at precisely the right moments, synchronizes marketing messages to prevent redundancy while maximizing impact, and manages fulfillment so customers receive their orders through their preferred method. This orchestration delivers truly unified experiences where every interaction builds meaningfully on the last, regardless of channel.
From Intelligence to Impact: The Business Outcomes
- Revenue Growth Through Precision AI enhances unified commerce by tailoring every interaction to the individual. Recommendations, promotions, and pricing adjust in real time, turning ordinary engagements into moments that drive higher conversions and larger baskets. Growth comes not from more traffic alone but from capturing greater value with every customer touchpoint.
- Efficiency Gains Across the Value Chain Operations become predictive rather than reactive. AI powered forecasting prevents the costly scramble of empty shelves during peak shopping periods while avoiding the cash drain of excess inventory in underperforming locations. Smart routing algorithms automatically shift deliveries to the nearest fulfillment center, cutting last-mile costs.
- Agility at Scale Unified commerce provides the connected foundation, while AI ensures the system responds instantly to market shifts. Demand fluctuations, competitive pressures, and emerging trends are absorbed without disruption, enabling retailers to adapt strategies continuously. Agility becomes systemic, allowing businesses to lead market changes rather than react to them
Intelligence in Action
- LVMH is leaning on AI to weather a slowing luxury market, unifying data from 75 brands with Google Cloud to drive smarter supply chain planning, pricing, marketing, and design. At Tiffany, sales advisers use AI agents to personalize outreach, while e-commerce teams deploy AI search to lift conversions. Its companywide agent, MaIA, now fields millions of employee requests each month, embedding intelligence into daily operations without losing the human touch of luxury.
- Saks Global is redefining luxury shopping for its 30 million U.S. customers with AI-driven personalization. A new engine customizes each homepage in real time, boosting revenue per visitor by 7% and conversions by nearly 10%. Next, clienteling apps will bring the same insights in-store, arming stylists with data to deliver seamless, curated experiences across Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman.
- Walmart is rebuilding retail around AI agents. Its new framework includes Sparky for customers, Marty for suppliers, and agents for employees and developers. Sparky is designed to replace search bars with task-based shopping, from creating grocery baskets to guiding complex purchases, and even interacting with external AI assistants. By embedding intelligence across 230 million weekly customer interactions, Walmart is positioning itself as the hub of AI-mediated commerce at scale.
Retail’s Next Chapter
AI in retail is not a future bet or a passing trend. It is the multiplier that turns unified commerce from connected systems into an intelligent growth engine. The proof is already here with higher conversions, lower costs, and faster adaptation in markets where every margin point matters. Retailers that treat AI as an add on will keep tinkering at the edges. Those that embed it into the fabric of unified commerce will set the pace for the next decade. Success will depend not on whether AI can deliver, but on how quickly retailers can embrace it.
