Haste makes waste: Out of sorts backend hits AI roll-out

Further evidence has emerged that businesses are rushing head on into adopting AI tools only to discover that when it comes to deploying the technology at scale, they simply do not have the backend systems or data infrastructure in place to unlock its full potential.

That is according to Amperity’s 2025 State of AI in Retail Report, which quizzed 1,000 retail professionals across marketing, IT, data and executive leadership.

The study reveals that 45% of retailers are already using AI daily or several times per week, and 97% plan to maintain or increase their AI investment in the coming year yet only 11% say they are fully prepared to deploy AI tools at scale.

The findings support Kantar’s “GenAI for marketing: Fear or FOMO” report, published earlier this year. This exposed the gap between the potential of AI to revolutionise the industry and current adoption, concluding that the true AI revolution was “between three and five years away”.

The Amperity study shows that, despite high levels of optimism, there are several key barriers: nearly three-fifths (58%) of respondents say their customer data is fragmented or incomplete; 46% cite high costs of AI tools as a top challenge; 35% note limited technical expertise; and only 21% are “very confident” in their ability to understand and act on customer data.

And, while nearly two-thirds (63%) of retailers believe AI will improve customer loyalty and even more (65%) expect it to increase customer lifetime value, only 43% are currently using AI in customer-facing applications such as personalisation, chatbots or tailored marketing experiences.

In fact, less than a quarter (23%) are using AI in production to resolve customer identities or prepare data for marketing use, indicating significant untapped potential in customer engagement strategies.

However, retailers with a customer data cloud (CDC) are moving at a different pace entirely.

Some 60% of CDP-equipped retailers use AI daily or several times per week (vs. 29% without a CDP); 35% use AI in production to prepare data for marketing or analytics (vs. 9% without a CDP); and 22% report full AI adoption across multiple business units (vs. 10%)

These retailers are also far more confident in their ability to understand and act on customer behavior, reinforcing the CDP’s role as a critical enabler of enterprise AI strategy.

Amperity chief executive Tony Owens said: “Retailers believe in AI’s potential to drive loyalty and lifetime value – but belief alone won’t close the gap between ambition and execution.

“What’s needed is unified, actionable customer data – regardless of where it resides. Retailers need to unify data without moving it, transforming fragmented records into complete customer profiles that fuel AI and measurable business results.”