A retailer may have an accurate view of what happened yesterday and make the wrong decision today. Retail conditions move while businesses are analysing them. Demand changes; inventory positions shift, and customers move between physical and digital channels. The value of an insight, therefore, depends on when it reaches the person or process responsible for acting on it.

Retailers have spent years improving operational visibility. The next challenge is reducing the time between recognising a change and responding to it.

When good information arrives too late

Consider a merchandising team working to a weekly reporting cycle. By the time an underperforming promotion or stock problem appears in that report, the business has spent several days operating under conditions that have already changed. The period between a relevant change taking place, the retailer recognising it and the business responding is described as decision latency. Some delay is unavoidable. The problem is the delay created by hand-offs, disconnected systems and information that has to be rebuilt before it becomes useful.

Faster analysis does not make a faster retailer

AI is changing the speed at which retailers identify patterns and prioritise issues. McKinsey’s work with Reckitt shows what this looks like closer to the store. Reckitt’s Smart Execution programme brings together point-of-sale trends, inventory signals, promotional information and store-level performance to direct field teams towards the issues that deserve attention. The case highlights that the business problem was not a lack of data because Reckitt already had millions of data points across its retail environment. The challenge was deciding where field teams should spend limited time and which store-level issues mattered most.

Smart Execution has resulted in stronger display compliance and a reduction in identified out-of-stock issues in the United States, alongside sales uplift in several markets. For retail leaders, the lesson is that faster analysis only matters when the operating model is ready to use it. If a recommendation enters a process built around manual hand-offs or disconnected platforms, the bottleneck moves rather than disappears.

Decision advantage has a clock attached

BCX helps retailers strengthen the environment behind these decisions so that information moves securely between stores, platforms and operational processes. Technology is important, but a more useful measure is reduced decision-making time. This gives leaders a practical place to start. Look at the retail decisions that have the greatest effect on performance and trace what happens between the first useful signal and the final operational response. The delays along that path show where attention is needed.

Decision advantage is an operational discipline geared to improve timing. Useful information has a short shelf life. The retailer that shortens unnecessary delays has more opportunity to act while that window is still open.

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Source: McKinsey & Company, ‘How AI-enabled execution became Reckitt’s “tenfold game changer”’, 6 August 2026.