According to the 2023 Connected Retail Experience Survey, performed by Incisiv in cooperation with Verizon Business, retailers prioritise investments in technologies that enhance operational efficiency in order to cut costs and boost profitability. AI is expected to grow 9x by 2025, mobile point of sale (POS) and curbside pickup sensors will be widely used, and robotics for associate jobs will expand in the next few years. Retailers forecast a huge growth in automation, with up to 70% of regular jobs being partially or completely automated by 2025. They want to capitalise on the labour and productivity gains by redeploying colleagues to customer-facing, high-value jobs and business operations support. The rising deployment of new store technologies, cloud application adoption, consumer devices, and in-store associate devices will put the shop network’s capacity to manage greater traffic to the test.

Read more from Supermarketnews