The safest bet in retail today is that AI will change how people buy. Autonomous agents will learn your preferences so they can compare products across retailers and find the best price, and personalized shopping experiences will follow customers across channels. That’s where most of the headlines, investment and conference conversations are today.
I’ve spent three decades helping retailers adopt new technology, and I’ve watched the industry predict the end of the physical store more than once. The pandemic gave us the biggest test we’ll probably ever get of whether shopping would permanently move online. It didn’t.
Before the pandemic, ecommerce accounted for roughly 11% of U.S. retail sales. During lockdowns, it climbed to about 16%. Years later, it has settled at about the same level. Even under the most extreme conditions imaginable, five out of every six retail dollars were still spent in physical stores. This number alone should heavily influence where retailers focus their AI investments.
The 84% Is Still Running Blind
The industry is putting enormous intelligence into the 16% of retail that happens online. Meanwhile, most of the business still happens inside stores, where many operational decisions get made the same way they were made 10 years ago.
Retailers come to us with ordinary problems, not requests for AI platforms. Milk gets delivered to the back of the store and never makes it into the cooler. Produce sits too long before it’s marked down. A shelf goes empty even though inventory is available somewhere else. A cooler starts leaking, and no one notices until someone slips. None of these problems makes headlines, but they all cost retailers money every day.
Retail operates on thin margins. Recovering even a small amount of those losses immediately hits the bottom line. At the point of sale, catching a missed scan and prompting a customer to rescan can generate a 374% return on investment, with payback in under six months. The opportunity is to apply that same thinking across the rest of the store.
Vision Changes the Equation
People understand the world primarily through vision. We use our other senses to add context, but sight comes first. Retail is no different.
Retail has always had the equivalent of eyesight. Stores are full of cameras. Until recently, though, retailers had no practical way to interpret what those cameras were seeing in real time. Once you can understand what’s happening visually, adding other signals like RFID and shelf sensors becomes much easier. Vision is the foundation, not just another input.
Today, vision helps retailers recover revenue, reduce waste, and identify safety issues as they happen. Tomorrow, those same video feeds will answer much broader operational questions: is a promotion changing customer behavior, does the store match the planogram and are shoppers responding the way the retailer expected? We can demonstrate many of those capabilities today, even if they’re still expensive to deploy at scale.
Why the Store Floor Gets Overlooked
Retail has spent years optimizing digital commerce because digital data is easy to measure. You know exactly how many people clicked, abandoned a cart, or completed a purchase. Stores have never worked that way.
Once someone walks through the front door, most of what happens becomes invisible. Retailers know what sold at checkout, but they don’t know why another product never made it onto the shelf, why produce spoiled in the back room or why one display consistently outperformed another.
What surprises me is how many retailers accept those operational losses as part of doing business. They know they’re losing money, but they often can’t tell you exactly where it’s happening or which problems matter most. Once the store becomes observable, those conversations change.
AI changes the equation so that for the first time, retailers can observe what’s always happened on the store floor and act while it still matters.
The Store Is Still Where Retail Wins
AI will change how consumers shop, and I have no doubt it’ll improve the customer journey, but I’m more convinced the bigger business opportunity is inside the store.
The retailers that separate themselves over the next decade will use AI to merge the plan of record and the reality inside their stores, not just build better shopping experiences online. That’s where AI will matter most.
Joe White is the CEO of Everseen, a leading Vision AI platform for retailers. He previously served as Chief Product and Solutions Officer at Zebra Technologies, where he oversaw strategy, investment and product development across the company’s extensive solutions portfolio. White joined Zebra in 2014 following the acquisition of Motorola Solutions’ Enterprise Business and held senior leadership roles at Motorola, Motorola Solutions, CAIS Internet and Digex. He is passionate about driving the adoption of enterprise technologies and is a strong supporter of those who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces.
