Five Critical Technology Trends for Retailers in 2025

Weaving through the bustling vendor booths at NRF’s Big Show, I couldn’t help but notice several recurring themes—patterns that promise to reshape our industry’s landscape in the months and years ahead. While the topics weren’t necessarily new, the approaches to addressing common use cases were. I found myself leaning into certain booths to investigate further and discovered five themes that I believe have the potential to transform retail businesses in fundamental ways.

1. Generative artificial intelligence (AI)

I know, we’re starting off with an obvious topic, but not discussing generative AI would be like talking about The Beatles without mentioning John Lennon. Last year, there was a lot of excitement around generative AI, but few companies could share actual results. This year, things are different. Retailers are going beyond experimentation and are focusing on cost-effectively scaling use cases that drive benefits. One example of a retailer successfully supporting multiple generative AI use cases is Amazon, which is using generative AI to help consumers and sellers create videos. It’s also helping them integrate smart shopping assistants with Amazon Rufus.

To date, we’ve seen the most success among retailers who are using generative AI to improve product catalog data. By automating the collection of product attributes, retailers can offer improved product descriptions and more accurate search results. For example, Nykaa, India’s preferred lifestyle retailer for 27 brands, formerly had 300 people reviewing product listings for missing or inaccurate data. Automating this process has reduced errors, increased accuracy, and allowed the team to get products on site much faster.

There are many additional use cases—such as virtual shopping assistants, product image manipulation, product ideation, and so on—but these were the ones that stood out to me the most.

2. Agentic AI

It sounds like a made-up term meant to confuse the masses, but “agentic AI”—which is a step beyond the chatbots we use daily—has tremendous potential. Agentic AIs are attuned to specific industries or tasks, but they also exist for general purposes. An example of a general-purpose agentic AI is Anthropic computer use. Gartner predicts that by 2028, agentic AI will make 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions autonomously, an increase from zero percent in 2024¹. There are three things that make these agents so valuable. First, they are autonomous because they can carry out tasks without intervention. Second, they use the chain-of-thought in LLMs to decompose problems. Third, they can invoke tools to further assist with task completion. In short, they go beyond generating text and images to perform actions on your behalf.

This is all great, but what really excites me are domain-specific agents such as those offered by Salesforce for retailers, which now includes agentic AIs with specialized skills through Agentforce. Agentforce is the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform that helps companies get more done, supporting representatives in building better customer relationships and serving as an always-on digital workforce for AI success. Another great example of agentic AI for industry, which appears in guidance from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is using Amazon Bedrock Agents as shopping assistants. This allows retailers to employ agentic AI for product recommendations—and it even adds products to the cart. The future will certainly bring AI-powered agents specializing in things such as forecasting, product reorders, invoice processing, pricing, and other domains, where rules are less defined necessitating reasoning skills.

3. Retail media networks

Amazon started running ads about its storefront back in 2012, but recently, the technology has become more readily available to retailers—including a new offering called Amazon Retail Ad Service. Online retailers such as iHerb and Oriental Trading Company use Amazon Retail Ad Service to source advertisements for display on their own sites, acting as both a new source of revenue through ad fees and boosting sales of endemic products.

As hyper-personalization technology continues to mature, ads will become more targeted and therefore more effective. These ads will also use low-cost hardware such as Signage Stick to extend beyond the home in a cost-effective way.

4. Immersive shopping experiences

For years we’ve talked about using technologies such as Proto holograms, magic mirrors, Bodd 3D body scanning, and augmented reality to weave digitization into physical stores. Various types of technology make it possible to bring aspects of web shopping into the physical realm. Specifically, Proto’s hologram displays—Luma and M—offer better product visualization, enhanced interactivity, and more avenues for conversion, while Bodd 3D scanning technology provides customers with instant apparel sizing. Now, these types of immersive experiences are also working in reverse, bringing physical aspects of shopping online with virtual stores, 3D product images, in-store chatbots, and virtual try-on solutions. Going forward, retailers will continue to make online experiences feel more like shopping in a store and, conversely, make in-store experiences as efficient as online shopping.

5. Modern commerce

Despite all the talk, channel silos still exist for most retailers. Many still use batch processing to move data, which can cause latency issues. Another hurdle to innovation is brittle integrations. Retailers know the changes they need to make, but they are constrained by technology debt and the weight of past architectural decisions from three CIOs ago. Retailers have definitely excelled in pockets, but to truly reach a future-ready commerce stance, they must invest in four key areas:

• Omnichannel – At this point, almost every retailer is running some form of omnichannel sales and marketing, but have they optimized enough to safeguard profitability? Are they handling the corner cases, including returns? Is the experience as seamless as possible? Prioritizing investments in robust omnichannel experiences is now a must-have for retailers.
• Unified commerce – Stitching together in-store and online systems using a duct tape approach may trick shoppers into thinking a retailer is omnichannel, but the real solution involves unifying data so there’s only one product catalog, one customer database, and one set of promotions, among other assets. Channels should feature bespoke user interfaces that are underpinned by a single selling engine.
• Composable commerce – The rigidity of monolithic infrastructure and the complexities of integrations hold back innovation. To solve this, retailers need to embrace a composable approach to commerce using the latest MACH architecture.
• Personalization – To the extent of their knowledge about each shopper, retailers need to personalize as much as possible. Expectations are high for relevant, compelling experiences that are vastly differentiated.

Not every retailer starts from the same place, so each journey will be different. My hope is that every retailer considers these five themes and embraces the technology that matters most to them as part of their long-term strategies.

[1] The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025, Gartner