Retail’s AI Future May Be Bigger and Slower Than You Think with EY and EY Studio+ | WRC 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton, and we are coming to you live from the World Retail Congress in Berlin.

And of course, we are at the Vuzion podcast studio now.

Joining me is Malin Andre, the global retail industry leader at EY and as well as Stephen Bailey, who is EY Studio Plus America's retail leader.

Welcome to both of you.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

Well, let's start off.

Tell our audience a little bit about yourselves and what it is that you both do in your roles, or what is it that you oversee.

Marlon, let's start with you.

So I lead our retail sector globally, and that's across all the different service lines that we have.

So everything from consulting to tax advice to assurance and transactions.

Oh, my God.

So it's a lot.

But we have great teams across the globe.

And my role is all about building the right capabilities and making sure that we serve our clients in the best possible way.

Makes sense, Steven.

Yeah.

So I said in ui, Studio plus and Lead, retail for America is there.

What that means is Studio plus is really where UI brings everything to life for the customer.

Everything.

Front office.

So experience, marketing, sales, service, store experience, all that fun stuff.

Commerce.

Right.

We live in that.

We live in that customer world.

My God.

You guys have it covered then?

Pretty much, right?

Yeah, we do.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay, well, the reason you're here is you guys just put out a new report on how AI is shaping retail.

So, Malin, I want to ask you, what were some of the big takeaways from that report?

I would say the key takeaway is that given that the pace of change is so remarkably fast and there's so many external factors impacting where we're going to end up in the future, no one can really predict exactly how the future is going to look like for retail.

So what we've done is that we're looking at retail through four different lenses and possible scenarios.

And this is by no means meant to be exact predictions.

It's meant to be more extremes that can help retail leaders to navigate the possible future.

So there's a constraint scenario, a growth scenario, transform scenario, and even a collapse scenario.

Collapse scenario.

Okay.

Wow, that does sounds kind of ominous when you put it like that.

So what do all those mean?

What?

Get.

Get.

Go a level deeper for me in terms of.

Of what you looked at in regards to each of those scenarios.

Sure.

So the constraint scenario, that's a scenario which is very much shaped by the restrictions that we have.

New legislations will hold back scaling of AI Cyber attacks, also internal silos and capability, lack of the right capabilities within the organizations.

So AR will not scale as fast as everyone is talking about today.

Okay.

And that means that AI will be predominantly applied in the back end processes and maybe not so much in the front end processes going forward.

Okay, so that's one scenario.

Yeah, this is great.

Okay.

All right, let's keep.

Yeah.

The second scenario is a growth scenario.

Okay.

And that's where AI really, really scales across the whole value chain of retailers about front end and back end.

And I mean, agent E commerce that everyone is talking about here at WRC is really a growth driver for retailers.

And it's open and distributed agents that's being freely used by retailers.

Okay.

And then we have the transform scenario, which is really taking this one step.

Further, even further beyond that.

Yes, yes.

So this is where AI really enables truly new business models and retailers become the orchestrator.

And there's also micro entrepreneurs that retailers can sell to.

So it's, we say being that orchestrator, providing your logistics network as a service and really getting all the different parties together and leveraging AI to enable new business models.

Okay, got it.

And the last one, the collapse, there's another one.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

Yes.

Wow.

All right.

Okay.

So that is the fact that, I mean, all these agents are being.

And the new AI solutions are very much being developed by big, big tech platform players.

Yeah.

So that's a scenario where the power is being concentrated to a few players globally.

Okay.

And those players will start to increase their prices for their services.

Oh, wow.

Quite a lot.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

And this will mean that not all retailers can afford to be on those channels and we will see a lot of retailers being disintermediated in the end.

So this is of course not the most positive scenario, but still a lot of.

A lot of factors in all of these scenarios we see already today.

Yeah.

Thank God the weather's beautiful outside, Matt.

Okay.

Wow, that's really interesting.

So, yeah, there's a big disparity in those options.

So the idea behind the report was to kind of put things in the perspective of that framework.

I'm curious, did you at all put any probability assumptions in terms of which of those is more likely to play out versus others or how should my listeners think about that?

It's quite interesting because we're doing quite a lot of workshops around the four futures right now.

And today, later today we're going to have a launch workshop with several different retail leaders and different people tend to have different projections.

So I would say it's kind of scattered.

We haven't done like a survey yet, but that's probably something we should do next.

But the idea.

The idea is to prepare the retail leaders of today and tomorrow for the scenarios.

Right.

And then allow them to choose which of the scenarios they want to fall on, given whatever psychological dimensions they want to bring to the discussion, I would imagine.

Yeah.

And really identify those no regret moves that will help them to succeed no matter what scenario plays out.

Exactly.

So we've actually also done short movies of fictive companies and how they succeed in each of these different scenarios.

So we have a fashion retailer, a furniture retailer, a grocery and a coffee chain.

So that's also helping companies to be inspired.

All made with the help of AI too, I imagine, those videos.

Right, of course, yeah.

Actually, they kicked that off.

The conference kicked off here yesterday with an AI made video, and they intentionally said that, which was great.

All right, Stephen, let's bring you into the conversation now because I'm curious.

So.

So Mylon just did a great job kind of painting the pictures of the four different scenarios that you and I think, you know, could play out here and that people need to be aware of.

But I'm curious for you, how quickly will the operational models change and shift because of AI?

I think that's the key.

Right.

Is there's no doubt that the change itself is going to be immense.

But our contention is that it's not as fast or as scaled as all the hype would let you believe.

That's good to hear.

But it's going to happen.

But it's just a matter of everybody thinks it's going to happen tomorrow.

And of course it's not.

The way we look at it is in our recent report of AI in the future for 2030.

Retailers who really double down and are intentional about treating data as architecture, being intentional about AI as infrastructure and moving forward, they're the ones that are going to see the most change the fastest, and they're going to be the ones that are going to come out ahead by 2030 for sure.

But for most people, you're not really going to see the change by the end of 2026.

Right.

So everybody's like, okay, but that doesn't mean you should slow down.

So it's this contention for leaders that how fast do I go?

How long do I wait for standards to emerge?

Where.

Where do I start?

And so if you really are intentional and work on infrastructure architecture for AI data in particular, that's going to set you up for Success and help you be faster than your competition, which ultimately is the goal.

Yeah.

And be prepared for any of the scenarios like Marlon just talked about.

That's right.

Okay, so I'm curious then.

So you know, you said Marlon said agentic AI seems like the talk of the town at every conference I go to.

Whether right or wrong.

When you look at it, Steven, from an organizational perspective, where will the moves to agentic happen first?

Sure.

If you think about the areas within an organization for retailers where decision velocity is high and data is dense, those are the areas that are going to be affected and really have the biggest opportunity.

So specifically, three come to mind.

Right.

Merchandising and supply chain.

We're already seeing agents and AI working there.

Price, promotion, supplier management, happening more and more in real time.

Right.

Things that took category teams, weeks, months to do in advance are now being done.

If they did it right.

If they did it are being compressed down into weeks or even better, are turning into continuous cycles.

So that's one, two.

Marketing and personalization.

I feel like I've been talking about personalization my entire 30 year career.

Everybody is hyper.

Personalization, personalization at scale.

But it always mattered.

It still matters.

So we can laugh about talking about it forever, but AI is really going to be the game changer finally for us.

Not the end station probably, but definitely finally.

Because AI and the agents can do so much more at scale and speed that humans just can't do.

So now I have the ability to finally personalize in ways that are going to lower customer acquisition costs and are going to really drive loyalty because I'm going to be able to create those moments that matter finally with the next best actions I've been talking about for 30 years that actually hit at the right moment, but also not only in the consumer interaction directly, but also for the associates.

So for your associates and in the retail space, they have all the information that they need to create an experience that we've always wanted.

We've always been wanting these personalized experiences, whether it's in store or digital.

Now I finally have the information available to prompt either an agent, a customer or an associate to do what's best next.

Okay, got it.

And then the last one, the last place is store operations and workforce scheduling.

Right.

So the mundane but the very important because now finally the.

I was astounded to recently read from one of our reports that people can spend up to 15 hours a week on scheduling manually for a given store operation.

15 Hours, right.

Going back and forth.

Hey Susie, do you have Monday off.

What do you need?

Right.

It takes forever.

Finally, now you can reduce that down to nothing automated as much as possible.

And you can do it in a way so that it's smart, because that's the goal.

It has to be intelligent.

How am I looking at weather, inventory, personal days off, customer foot traffic.

Yeah, exactly.

Events.

So now I can actually use those data points and AI to help automate that process.

So those are the three areas where it's going to hit first.

Got it.

I want to dig into the second one a little bit, personalization, for a couple reasons, because one, I agree with you.

Personalization is the most overused buzzword in the industry, in my opinion.

But to the, to your point, it is we're at a tipping point or an inflection point in terms of how we can do it.

And the thing that I was thinking about in terms of what you say is, the great thing about generative AI particularly is it allows our customers to talk to us and interact with us in a different way.

That's right.

Well, that enables the personalization to happen.

That's a different way in a different scale.

So I'm curious too, to close on this, what are your thoughts?

And maybe both of you, but Stephen, let's go to you first.

What are your thoughts in terms of the consumer experiences and how they're going to change because of AI, both in the digital and the physical world?

Excuse me.

Yeah.

Think about this.

Everybody is acting a little bit like, oh, agents are going to be the interface, period, full stop.

They're going to be one of the interfaces and the human customer experience is still going to matter and still be a differentiator.

So if you look in the digital space, right, Agentic commerce is rightfully the buzz.

You've got to prepare.

It is a game changer.

Agents are moving from informing customers to acting on their behalf.

So that is a change that is going to affect retailers heavily.

I have to be able to be agent ready.

My data has to be available for an agent to make a decision in real time, quickly, and possibly even convert more and more.

But that said, the experience for the customer, whether they come in the store, because 77% of people still discover new products in a retail setting, physically want to touch, feel, experience, look at a product, and potentially for higher consideration, products interact with an associate.

That's not going to go away.

It may change.

It will shift.

More of your commerce is going to go and be more agentic led because people are going to deal with AI interfaces versus your dot com.

But that doesn't mean that the store experience is completely forgotten.

So the retailers who are going to differentiate against competition are the ones that still put a clear focus on customer experience and have that human element really thought out that is backed by all of this automation, backed by this data, and is really driven and not superseded.

Yeah, that's been my takeaway from the show.

It's really the human enhanced element from AI.

That's right.

Like, it's not about the physical necessarily of the retail, but it's the human element of what I can do and how it can bridge new connections.

Going back to what we were saying before.

Man, let's give you the last word here.

Any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

No, I fully agree with you, Stephen.

I mean, retail is always been a human business and I don't think we're going to see that going away anytime soon.

Of course, Atlantic Commerce, that's the hottest topic in this conference and in all other conference right now.

And it will happen and it will change a lot.

But we still want that human connection as consumers.

So that's going to be important.

Yeah, well said, well said.

That actually gives me hope for that.

The future is not dystopian too.

You know, at the end of the.

Day, I'm also positive.

Right.

Are you okay?

I should have asked you that.

Yes.

All right.

Humans aren't replaced.

They just.

They're just supported.

Right, right, right, right, right.

All right, well, thank you both.

Thank you very much.

That was really interesting, really enlightening discussion.

If you want to go ahead and read the report, you know, where can they find the report?

We have a good link that we'll post on LinkedIn or otherwise.

Just reach out to us.

Okay, perfect.

Yeah.

What's the best way for people to reach out to you?

Just on LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn.

It's probably the best.

That's the best.

Thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Thank you.

All right, well, thank you very much.

Thank you to Vuzion for sponsoring our coverage at the World Retail Congress and to all our fans out there, as always, be careful out there.