Challenges such as market volatility, rising expectations for hyper-personalization, and an increasingly competitive landscape are some of the structural and systemic challenges that confront a growing number of retail leadership teams. While these challenges are solvable, the current set of tools and operating models at most retailers’ disposal were never designed to deliver what’s now needed in the market.

Retailers need to rethink what work gets done across the enterprise and how—not just who does it or where it’s done—to unlock agility, control, and value at scale. And AI-sourcing offers that new foundation.

AI-sourcing is a signal of the next wave of transformation in how retail enterprises could start operating. At its core, AI-sourcing introduces a powerful new workforce: digital workers. Digital workers are contextually to fully autonomous AI agents that not only automate tasks, but orchestrate workflows, make contextual decisions, and work around the clock.

Digital workers can help retail leaders transform how their organizations manage supply chains, merchandise assortments, plan demand, and deliver customer care.  They enable a level of agility and intelligence that human-only models simply can’t match.

The case for disruption

Retailers are under mounting pressure to modernize their operating models amid growing economic and structural complexity. Profitability is being squeezed by persistent inflation, unpredictable supply chain disruptions, global trade tariffs, rising labor costs, and intensified global competition. Simultaneously, customers now expect seamless, personalized, and real-time experiences, along with omnichannel integrations across all touchpoints.

These conditions are exposing the systemic limitations of legacy operating models including traditional outsourcing and shared services. While these approaches once drove scale and cost efficiency, they now limit the speed, agility, and intelligence that today’s retail landscape demands.

Legacy operating models for labor-cost savings alone can no longer satisfy the operational needs of modern retail. The industry needs intelligent agility—the ability to sense and respond to changes instantly, and to leverage vast data to make optimal decisions in moments that matter. Legacy operating models, with their limitations and organizational friction, are no longer suited to those tasks. This is where AI-sourcing with digital workers offers a new path. 

How to enable AI-sourcing in retail

AI-sourcing requires reconfiguration of retail functions around digital execution. It operates on the principle of AI-first design. Rather than layering AI on top of old workflows, AI-sourcing should ideally begin with a top-down, outcome-driven lens. Retail organizations should first define the intended business outcome and then redesign the process to achieve that goal using the fewest and most effective steps possible.

To better understand the operational mechanics of digital workers and hybrid workforce, let’s look at two retail functions in more detail—merchandising and marketing and store operations—with illustrative workflows and outcomes.

Move from cost center to value creator

While the cost savings are significant, AI-sourcing unlocks value far beyond operational efficiency. It becomes a strategic lever for growth, profitability, improved customer experience, and workforce productivity:

Getting started with AI-sourcing

Retailers should look to embrace AI-sourcing as a reinvention of how work is designed, delegated, and scaled, versus a technology deployment. It’s an operating model transformation rooted in the belief that AI agents—digital workers—could own end-to-end workflows, and not just tasks or siloed activities. Getting started requires more than a proof-of-concept mindset though. It demands strategic foresight, sponsorship at the highest levels, cross-functional commitment, and clear economic outcomes.

Download our full report to learn how AI-sourcing can help your organization lead with a new operating model that’s built for agility, scale, and intelligence.