Enterprise retail is at an inflection point. Growth looks different, AI is moving faster than most roadmaps, and the tech decisions leaders make today will define the next three years. At a recent Retail Hive eComm Leaders event, SCAYLE sat down with senior retail executives for a day of candid conversations – and these six themes kept standing out:
1. Growth is still the goal, but the playbook has changed
The level of appetite for expansion hasn’t shifted. But the approach has. Retailers are moving away from bold, all-in bets and toward tightly scoped pilots, franchise models, and phased rollouts that let them test before they commit.
This shift makes sense in context. Global economic uncertainty remains high heading into 2026, with a modest slowdown in global growth widely anticipated. Against that backdrop, modular strategies that preserve optionality are the smart play.
The brands moving fastest right now aren’t the biggest risk-takers. They’re the most disciplined testers.
2. AI is being used carefully
AI is everywhere at the conversation level, but much more contained at the execution level. At the event, retailers described using it for specific, bounded tasks: copy enrichment, customer service automation, demand forecasting. Very few were calling it transformational yet.
That caution is understandable: Deloitte’s 2026 enterprise AI research found that only 34% of organizations are truly reimagining their business with AI – the majority are still in productivity-and-efficiency mode. In retail specifically, brand risk is a very real concern, with AI-generated imagery and conversational advice in regulated categories flagged as particular pressure points.
The mood among eCom leaders? Test, learn, and contain. That’s not caution for its own sake, it’s scaling on their own terms.
3. The biggest blocker is alignment
The insight that came up most consistently: the hardest problems are organisational.
Multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, legacy system choices made by different teams for different reasons – these create fragmentation that no new platform can fix on its own. Several leaders admitted openly that aligning internal stakeholders was harder than any technology decision they’d faced.
Transformation, it turns out, is as much a governance problem as a tech problem. Retailers who crack the alignment challenge will move faster than those chasing the newest tool.
4. Legacy stacks are becoming a growth ceiling
The event surfaced something many retail leaders already know but rarely say out loud: their current tech stacks are limiting them.
Workarounds. Fragmented systems. Custom integrations held together by institutional knowledge and hope. 44% of retail executives say their legacy systems are actively slowing down innovation. That number should alarm anyone planning for the next three to five years.
The difference now is that the gap between legacy infrastructure and what growth requires has become too wide to bridge with workaround.
5. Omnichannel is a data problem
Click and collect. Buy online, return in-store. Real-time order visibility. These capabilities are increasingly table stakes, but delivering them consistently depends on accurate, real-time inventory data across every location.
Research shows that 20% of all retail is ‘I want it now’, making real-time inventory visibility across all platforms essential. Yet most retailers are still far from delivering it consistently.
The gap between ambition and execution is a data gap. Retailers who frame omnichannel as an infrastructure challenge, not a CX initiative, are the ones making real progress.
6. Speed vs. risk: a tension with no easy answer
Speed or caution. It’s the question every commerce leader is sitting with right now. AI-native competitors are setting new baselines for speed and personalization – and the pressure to keep pace is real. But so is the risk of investing in the wrong areas and damaging brand equity built over years.
The result is what you might call measured urgency: a genuine commitment to moving forward, paired with an equally genuine commitment to not moving recklessly. Nobody wants to be the brand that bet everything on the wrong wave.
So where does that leave you?
The patterns point to a clear strategic sequence: fix your data foundation before strategically layering on AI. Align your stakeholders before you scale your tech. Test in contained areas before transforming at the enterprise level.
Chasing AI for its own sake won’t put you ahead. Neither will waiting. The retailers who will lead the next three to five years are the ones who know the difference and have the foundation to act on it. Does yours?
Learn how to future-ready your tech stack for the new era of retail.