Retailers tend to notice disconnection when something goes wrong. A promotion drives sales, yet the cost of fulfilling those orders erodes some of the value it created. Teams spend hours reconciling information before they’re ready to make an operational decision. These problems may surface in different parts of the business, but they often share the same underlying issue: systems, teams and channels that are working from different views.

The hidden cost of friction

Retail technology environments have grown over time. Stores, ecommerce solutions, loyalty, inventory and fulfilment platforms perform their intended role while remaining poorly integrated with the wider operation.

McKinsey’s 2025 Global Merchant Survey indicates that merchants could reclaim up to 40% of their time from low-value work, including consolidating information and reconciling data across siloed systems.

The same survey found that 71% believed the AI merchandising tools available to them had delivered limited or no business impact. The findings separate technology investment from business value. A retailer may have sophisticated tools in several parts of the operation and still lose time, effort and margin.

Where the cost shows up

Inventory exposes the problem clearly. Accurate sales information and a capable forecasting system don’t prevent excess stock in one store while another location runs short if replenishment teams have a fragmented view of demand and availability.

Fulfilment adds another layer. An online sale may look successful at a transaction level, while the economics behind it tell a different story. Stock sourced from the wrong location, extra handling or a delayed order all change the value of that sale. For the customer, the same operational disconnect appears as an unavailable product, a late delivery or a broken promise. Margin leakage does not begin with pricing. It’s also lost in the effort required to complete a sale, the stock held in the wrong place and the manual work used to bridge systems that were never designed to co-operate.

Technology should remove work, not create more of it

The growth of AI makes this issue harder to ignore. McKinsey’s research points to fragmented systems, poor data quality and uneven adoption as reasons many merchandising investments have struggled to produce value at scale. A sophisticated recommendation has limited worth when an employee still has to move between systems, reconcile conflicting information or manually carry the process forward.

Retail leaders need a practical test for technology investment: does it remove friction in the business’ operations? And does that improvement show up in a commercial or operational outcome? BCX approaches intelligent retail from this perspective. Connectivity, cloud, data, AI, applications and security have greater value when they collectively support the operating environment. Decision advantage is an operating discipline that becomes tangible when less value is lost between different parts of a business: through stronger availability, better margin protection, lower operational effort and more value from the technology already in place.

Our most important customer, is yours

Sources: McKinsey & Company, ‘Merchants unleashed: How agentic AI transforms retail merchandising’, 9 January 2026. Evidence cited: 2025 Global Merchant Survey of 114 merchants, 40% of time spent on low-value tasks, 71% reporting limited or no business impact from AI merchandising tools.