In the AI era, strategic partnerships are key to retail success
“In the world we’re living in, the deployment of successful AI solutions and use cases is not your typical IT project,” Hayley Tabor, vice-president, global alliances, industries, at Dell Technologies, said on a panel discussion at The National Retail Federation’s (NRF), Retail’s Big Show in New York this week.
Tabor, who moderated a panel of senior execs from Nvidia, Everseen and Accenture, said partner ecosystems is becoming increasingly critical to the successful deployment of AI in retail.
“Trying to develop everything in house in house, in my opinion, is a mistake,” said Azita Martin, vice-president and general manager, retail & CPG at Nvidia, a dominant player in the AI space.
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Instead, retailers should seek strategic collaborations with partners who have proven expertise in their areas. That approach, the panelists said, allows retailers to unlock AI’s transformative potential and scale solutions to complex challenges across supply chain, e-commerce, merchandising and more.
“No one provider can do everything,” said Joe White, CEO of Everseen, known for its vision AI-powered checkout solutions, so retailers need to build an ecosystem of strategic relationships.
“These are people going on a journey with you, who are going to reduce your risk—they’re moving at the pace of technology and moving you along that journey,” White said. “They’re giving you insights, scalability, project management and [showing] you how to avoid risk in your operation.”
Nvidia’s Martin emphasized that companies successfully leveraging AI have strong buy-in from the top. “AI is something that needs to be driven by a board of directors, the CEO and the C-suite—without question,” she said.
AI literacy among senior leaders is equally important. Brett Leary, global gen AI lead for Accenture’s retail practice, said there is clear link between executive understanding of how an AI solutions works—it’s impact on people and how it will be rolled out—and the ultimate success of an initiative.
But beyond the technology, change management is “super important” as organizations progress along their AI journeys.
“The idea that if you build it, they will come is definitely a fallacy in the space,” said Leary. “We can build all sorts of really slick solutions, but we need to figure out how do we get the organization (and the people using the tech) on board with it.”
That means clearly explaining why a tool is being introduced, what it does and how it will help employees. Leary pointed to merchandisers as an example.
“You have merchandisers that have been doing their jobs, 20, 30 years using Excel. They’re really good at what they do, it's in their brains.” he said. “Now you’re going to give them this LLM [large language model] powered box that’s spitting out: ‘We recommend you take this action' and 'have this in your assortment' and 'drop this' and 'change this price,’ That is a trust issue, right?” Providing foundational AI education and literacy would go a long way toward building trust and helping teams understand how these tools can make them more effective in their roles.
