Growth is a primary indicator of success in retail. Expansion into new markets, broader product portfolios, larger customer bases, and increased operational scale have traditionally been viewed as signs of a healthy and competitive business.
As organizations scale, maintaining customer relevance, innovation, and differentiation can become just as challenging as achieving growth itself. Organizations that once built their success on deep customer understanding, innovation, and brand differentiation are increasingly asking the same question:
“How do we maintain the qualities that made us successful while operating at enterprise scale?”
2026 CGI Voice of Our Clients research confirms that growth, customer experience, operational efficiency, and profitability remain the highest priorities for retail leaders globally, while investments in technology modernization, AI, and automation are increasingly being evaluated based on their ability to deliver business outcomes.
Across the industry, three interconnected challenges are emerging.
Challenge #1: Staying close to customers at scale
The most successful retailers have always had a deep understanding of their customers. They recognized emerging trends early, identified shifts in behavior before competitors, and built products, services, and experiences that remained relevant to the people they served.
As organizations grow, maintaining this connection becomes more difficult. Customer interactions now span stores, e-commerce, mobile apps, loyalty programs, social channels, customer service, and fulfillment networks, while expectations for personalization, convenience, and consistency continue to rise.
At the same time, customers are increasingly willing to explore alternatives. Emerging brands can build strong communities quickly, while established brands face constant pressure to remain differentiated. This shift is reflected in recent Salesforce research, where 54% of consumer goods leaders say it is harder than ever to maintain customer loyalty, while 74% of consumers report switching brands in the past year. 1 The same study found that 70% of organizations are increasing investment in personalization, recognizing that more relevant and individualized experiences are becoming an important driver of customer retention.
Most retailers already possess enormous amounts of customer data. The challenge is transforming that information into a continuous understanding of changing customer needs and using those insights to inform merchandising, marketing, supply chain, product development, and store operations. Organizations that do this well are often better positioned to respond faster, strengthen customer loyalty, and unlock new growth opportunities.
Challenge #2: Innovating without losing focus
Innovation has always been central to retail growth, but sustaining it becomes more difficult as organizations mature. As retailers scale, investments in governance, forecasting, inventory management, and operational controls become essential to support consistency and growth. However, these same capabilities can also make experimentation slower and more difficult.
Retail leaders face increasing pressure to optimize costs, improve margins, and deliver predictable performance. At the same time, customers continue to expect new products, differentiated experiences, and meaningful innovation. In many retail categories, customers are no longer looking for more products. They are looking for products that feel more relevant to their needs, values, and lifestyles. This places greater pressure on organizations to identify emerging demand earlier and convert those insights into meaningful innovation.
The organizations making the greatest progress are not necessarily those launching the most products, but those that consistently connect customer insight to product innovation. By identifying emerging demand earlier, testing ideas quickly, and scaling what works, they are better positioned to strengthen relevance while sustaining growth.
Challenge #3: Turning connected intelligence into action
Over the past decade, retailers have invested heavily in data and analytics across virtually every part of the enterprise. Customer interactions, product performance, inventory, supply chain operations, digital engagement, and store activity can now be measured with unprecedented visibility.
Despite this increase in visibility, many organizations continue to face a familiar challenge: translating information into action.
The challenge facing many retailers is not necessarily a lack of data, but a lack of connected intelligence. Customer, product, inventory, supply chain, and operational data often exist across different functions, systems, and reporting structures, making it difficult to create a shared understanding of what is happening across the business.
As Forrester notes, data strategy is no longer a nice-to-have capability but a strategic differentiator. Increasingly, the organizations creating the greatest value are those that can connect trusted data across the enterprise and use it to inform decisions at scale2. This is also reflected in CGI's 2026 Voice of Our Clients research, where only 58% of retail organizations report having a holistic data strategy, while more than a third continue to manage data primarily within individual business domains.
For example, a change in customer demand may be visible through digital engagement data long before it appears in sales reports. Inventory imbalances may begin emerging in specific markets before they become visible at an enterprise level. Product trends may develop in one geography while remaining largely unnoticed elsewhere. The ability to identify these signals is important, but the greater challenge lies in connecting them, understanding their implications, and responding quickly enough to create value.
Achieving this requires more than technology. It requires trusted data, cross-functional visibility, clear decision ownership, and processes that enable organizations to act with confidence. This remains a significant challenge across the industry. CGI's 2026 Voice of our Clients research found that only 40% of organizations report producing measurable results from their digital strategies, highlighting that the greatest barrier is often not technology itself, but the organizational alignment and operational agility needed to translate investment into business value.
Responding to the growth challenge
Across our work with retailers and consumer brands, we are seeing organizations take a broader view of transformation, one that connects business strategy, operating models, data, and technology around a common objective: enabling faster, better decisions that strengthen customer relevance and support sustainable growth.
While every organization is at a different stage of its journey, three common areas of focus are emerging.
Building connected intelligence across the enterprise
Many retailers are moving beyond traditional reporting structures to create a more connected view of the business. Rather than managing customer, product, inventory, and operational information independently, organizations are increasingly bringing these data sources together to create shared visibility across functions.
The objective is not simply to improve reporting. It is to ensure that merchandising, marketing, supply chain, store operations, and digital teams are making decisions based on the same business signals, enabling faster alignment and more coordinated execution.
Reimagining how decisions are made
Technology alone cannot reduce decision latency. Increasingly, retailers are also rethinking how decisions move through the organization.
This includes simplifying governance, improving cross-functional collaboration, and creating operating models that allow teams to respond more quickly to changing customer needs and market conditions. In our experience, organizations that improve decision velocity are often those that align people, processes, and technology around shared business outcomes rather than functional priorities.
Aligning technology to business outcomes
Technology is an enabler, not the goal. Rather than asking where to apply AI or automation, organizations are starting with the business outcomes they want to achieve, such as better customer understanding, stronger execution, faster decisions, or more agile operations, and then identifying the technologies that best enable those capabilities.
Gartner reports that 91% of retail IT leaders expect AI to be among their highest technology priorities by 20263, highlighting the growing importance of AI across the industry. However, widespread adoption does not automatically translate into business value.
The 2026 CGI Voice of Our Clients research reinforces this perspective. Growth, revenue expansion, operational efficiency, profitability, and customer experience remain the highest priorities for retail leaders globally. Technology modernization, AI, and automation continue to gain momentum, but organizations increasingly view these investments as enablers of business outcomes rather than objectives in themselves.
Putting this into practice looks different for every retailer. Whether connecting customer, product, and operational data to create a more complete view of the business, modernizing core retail platforms, strengthening forecasting and inventory planning, or redesigning operating models to improve decision velocity, the objective remains the same: enabling organizations to respond faster, execute more effectively, and stay closer to their customers.
At CGI, we help retailers build these capabilities by connecting strategy, operations, data, and technology around measurable business outcomes. If you’d like to discuss the topics covered in this article, retail technology in general, or CGI’s work in this area across Canada, contact our experts below.
Sources:
- 1. Consumer Goods Leaders: AI Top Priority as 57% Expect Increased Instability, Salesforce, 2025
- 2. Data In 2025: Enough Talk — Here’s Why Strategy Matters Now, Forrester, 2025
- 3. Digital Transformation in Retail, Gartner, 2025
