Survey: Most retailers plan to maintain or increase AI investment in 2026
Retailers across the board are planning to maintain or increase artificial intelligence investments – but only some feel they are fully prepared.
According to a new survey of retail professionals from AI-powered customer data service Amperity, 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.
While 63% of retailers believe AI will improve customer loyalty and 65% expect it to increase customer lifetime value, only 43% are currently using AI in customer-facing applications such as personalization, chatbots or tailored marketing experiences. Less than a quarter (23%) of retailers surveyed are using AI in production to resolve customer identities or prepare data for marketing use.
Despite the current and planned investments, only 11% of those surveyed said their company is “fully prepared” to deploy AI tools at scale. Almost six-in-10 (58%) respondents say their customer data is fragmented or incomplete, while nearly half (46%) cite high costs of AI tools as a top challenge.
More than a third (35%) of retail professionals surveyed noted limited technical expertise. Only 21% are “very confident” in their ability to understand and act on customer data.
[READ MORE: Survey: AI usage among small businesses up 41%]
“Retailers believe in AI’s potential to drive loyalty and lifetime value – but belief alone won’t close the gap between ambition and execution,” said Tony Owens, CEO of Amperity. “What’s needed is unified, actionable customer data - regardless of where it resides.”
Amperity noted that retailers that utilize a customer data cloud (CDC) are coming out on top when it comes to AI utilization. The majority (60%) of CDC-equipped retailers use AI daily or several times per week (vs. 29% without a CDP), while more than a third (35%) use AI in production to prepare data for marketing or analytics (vs. 9% without a CDP). Twenty-two percent report full AI adoption across multiple business units (vs. 10%).
For its report, Amperity surveyed 1,000 retail professionals across marketing, IT, data and executive leadership.
