Amid growing inflationary pressures and geopolitical uncertainty, industry leaders are prioritizing cost efficiency while diversifying, optimizing supply chains, and enhancing the customer experience to stay competitive. In this video, we explore insights from the 2025 CGI Voice of Our Clients research, based on in-depth interviews with more than 113 retail, consumer goods and wholesale executives on the priorities and challenges shaping transformation across the industry.

To build lasting customer loyalty and unlock long-term profitable growth, retailers are doubling down on digital transformation—modernizing legacy systems and leveraging AI to enhance efficiency, customer experience, and smarter forecasting.

Key trends covered in this video:

  • Shift in the world economic order
  • Technology and digital acceleration
  • Customer experience, data and AI adoption
  • Operational efficiency and cost reduction
  • Reshoring and diversification

Learn how a global convenience retailer is simplifying operations, optimizing sourcing, and aligning systems to a global technology vision for faster go-to-market strategies, cost efficiencies, and scalable, future-ready capabilities.

At CGI, we help retailers deliver seamless experiences, empower sales assistants, enable smart inventory management and run efficient operations, while reducing costs and leveraging AI and automation to fuel both efficiency and growth.

Video transcript

Navigating disruptions in retail

Retail executives are navigating a perfect storm of disruption. Inflation and trade fluctuations are putting pressure on sales volumes and profit margins, as geopolitical tensions are disrupting supply chains.

In times of growing uncertainty, the impact of digitization on value chains continues to grow. There's tremendous pressure on reducing costs for retailers today. So, what can retailers do? You cannot just stop the tap and stop investments. You need to modernize your legacy systems to enable a modern and friction-free customer journey, but you can also use those investments to lower your operational costs. Those are the absolute most important things that you need to do. Do the investments, focus on the customer journeys, focus on operational efficiency.

Key insights from the 2025 CGI Voice of Our Clients research

Our Voice of Our Clients research with 113 retail executives reinforces that to stay competitive, leaders are prioritizing cost efficiency, while diversifying, optimizing supply chains and enhancing the customer experience.

Transformation demands a delicate balance. To remain competitive, retailers must invest in innovation and the adoption of AI while navigating the challenge of cutting costs.

Top trends and priorities in retail

Three major trends are reshaping the future of retail. There's immense pressure to do more with less. Enhancing operational efficiency and reducing costs ranks as the top business priority. But, with inflation impacting volumes and margins, cost-cutting alone isn't enough. To secure growth, retailers are venturing into new markets and rapidly investing in new products and services, which is their second most important business priority.

Today's customers also want accurate product information. This includes availability, pricing, flexible shopping, and payment options, as well as personalized recommendations and experiences. As a result, enhancing customer experience is the third most important business priority.

Over 40% of executives recognize they are significantly impacted by the shift in the world economic order. With rising geopolitical uncertainty, enhancing supply chain resilience is a strategic imperative. Leaders are reshoring closer to their market and diversifying to reduce risk. This, of course, raises costs, but it protects supply and ensures they can meet customer demand.

Growing importance of digital transformation

To adapt to these trends, retail executives are doubling down on digital transformation, modernizing legacy systems, using AI to drive efficiency, personalization, and smarter forecasting and replenishment. The focus is clear: reduce costs, build customer loyalty, and stay competitive.

When we look at the results from the Voice of Our Clients, which is our deep conversations with 1800 leaders around the world, we see a difference between the digital leaders and the rest. That has meant that they are thriving versus their competitors, and that they're getting the potential out of their investments in their digitization.

Today, consumers when shopping, expect information about products, their prices, availability at the tap of the fingers on their mobile phones. And this is regardless if they want to buy online or in the store.

But they don't want to come to the store and find out that it was wrong information. We don't have that product. That is not a good customer experience. So, all the information has to be correct, and it has to be updated in real-time.

In today's fast-moving environment, retailers need to pivot quickly to ensure short- and long-term growth. This requires investing in and enabling digital transformation to meet new market demands while keeping costs down.

Client success story: Using data and AI to drive retail excellence

A global convenience retailer recently began executing a strategic initiative focused on improving customer and employee experiences, increasing delivery quality, and expanding access to technical expertise.

As part of this transformation, the retailer partnered with us to modernize its IT service delivery, introducing automation, integrated data and analytics and AI-powered solutions to strengthen efficiency and agility. By streamlining operations, optimizing sourcing, and aligning technology systems globally, the retailer is unlocking capacity for growth. This enables faster go-to-market strategies, cost efficiencies, and scalable capabilities that serve both business and customer needs across regions.

Customer-focused strategies power sales, personalization and revenue growth

The number one priority is definitely to define the customer journey. So how are you going to deliver? How are you going to let your customers pay? How are you going to handle returns in-store and online? That has to be defined. And then, based on that, you design the IT systems and solutions that are required to fulfill that customer journey.

Make sure that you capture the data from the customers. All that data is a gold mine to provide loyalty insights that can drive personalization, product recommendations, which will increase sales. Because increased sales is a key driver now that the pressure on cost is so high. So you have to find new revenue streams. Here we also see that new revenues through marketplaces, dropship, etc., is a key driver to increase sales to your customer base.

Key takeaway: Leverage data, AI and modernization to boost customer experience and efficiency

For retailers, success isn't about reacting to change. It's about building lasting customer loyalty. This takes seamless experiences, empowered sales assistance, smart inventory management, and efficient operations. It also takes balancing costs with bold investments in AI and automation to fuel both efficiency and growth.

What does this mean for the path forward? Invest in the right technologies, not just to cut costs, but to unlock long-term profitable growth. The future will reward those who act with purpose and are driven by outcomes.