State of AI in retail and CPG
200 executives told us where AI really stands
Where does AI stand today in the consumer sector? We surveyed 200 executives to get their unfiltered perspectives. The takeaway? High conviction, low execution: Leaders call AI a top priority, but governance, investment, and scaling capabilities are still catching up.
Six distinct themes emerged from our survey
Few technologies have won boardroom consensus as quickly as AI. In retail and consumer products, leaders largely agree on its importance. The real question is no longer whether to act, it's how well you're acting.
Our survey examined that gap between belief and execution. We found confidence in AI’s potential, but far less certainty about returns. Strategy outpaces operating models, ambition outpaces investment, and pilots outpace production. The result is a sector moving with urgency, but not yet with discipline, and the distance between the two is where competitive advantage will be won or lost over the next 12 months.
The six themes that follow trace the distance on where leaders are aligned, where they remain stuck, and what distinguishes companies translating AI ambition into measurable commercial impact.
Adoption and strategic readiness
The “say-do” gap defines AI today in retail and CPG: 75% call AI a top strategic priority, but only 16.5% can quantify a return. We’re also seeing that leadership conviction is running ahead of organizational capability: Wide adoption of AI never exceeds 36% outside of IT.
Governance
Retail is consolidating around centralized AI governance (43%). CPG hasn’t converged: It’s split almost evenly across three models. The bigger risk isn’t which model you pick; it’s that 54% of AI strategy ownership sits with tech leaders, not the P&L owners who have to deliver business results from it.
Investment
Investment in AI is still nascent, with about half of the respondents investing <0.5% of revenue in AI despite considering it a priority. While 82% plan to increase AI investment in the next 12 months, most of that spend is still going into IT/data infrastructure, not value-generating use cases.
Use case maturity and deployment
Both sectors are piloting broadly but scaling almost nothing, with enterprise-wide deployment in the single digits (7%–10%) for both retail and CPG. Currently, the retail sector is one step ahead, with more AI capabilities in production mode than pilots.
Value realization
Both sectors feel the most impact from AI in productivity and cost reduction. CPG companies have an edge when it comes to product development (27% vs. 18%), while retail is leading in revenue growth (38% vs. 10%). Over all, the retail sector’s AI investments are translating into commercial outcomes, while CPG’s are still operational.
Agentic commerce
We see a paradox forming: While 40% of CPGs and 29% of retailers have no defined approach to agentic commerce yet, 50%–60% are already piloting capabilities and prioritizing API readiness. Execution is running way ahead of strategy.
Read together, those six themes tell one consistent story: the consumer sector has decided that AI matters, but it hasn't yet decided how to make it pay. The conviction is real and durable. The execution—governance owned by the right leaders, investment aimed at value rather than plumbing, and capabilities that scale beyond the pilot—is still being built.
That's not cause for caution; it's a roadmap. The leaders who close the say-do gap will do three things deliberately: put AI strategy in the hands of the P&L owners accountable for the outcomes, redirect spend toward the use cases that move revenue and margin, and treat scaling, not piloting, as the real measure of progress. Agentic commerce only sharpens the urgency: the capabilities are being piloted today, but the strategy to govern them is largely unwritten, and that window won't stay open long.
Kevin Byrne
