Welcome to This Week’s dispatch
In this week’s edition:
Boards are funding the wrong retail strategy
Are boards misreading where retail is actually breaking?
This week we hosted Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights at CI&T.
Melissa has spent her career inside the US retail system, working with brands such as Target and Anthropologie.
She now operates from London, advising global organisations on customer behaviour, experience design, and transformation.
That shift in geography matters. Operating between systems exposes what local operators tend to normalize.
The UK market is often described as mature. Structured. Disciplined.
This conversation with Melissa Minkow is useful because it does not focus on AI as a concept. It focuses on behaviour.
A dataset of over 2,000 consumers in the UK and Ireland shows something more structural:
• 64% expect retailers to use AI to improve the shopping experience
• Around 53% already use AI tools during shopping
• 70% have purchased through social platforms
This matters at board level for a simple reason.
Most retail strategies are still built on assumptions about:
how discovery happens
what drives loyalty
where value is created
Those assumptions are no longer holding.
The risk is not that retailers are late to AI.
Yet the most relevant insight did not come from the numbers themselves.
It came from a simple observation.
“This is the first time in my career where consumers are moving faster than retailers.”
Retail has historically led. Click and collect, QR codes, omnichannel fulfilment. All were pushed by companies before consumers fully understood them. This time the sequence is inverted.
Consumers are integrating AI into their behaviour.
Retailers are still deciding what to do about it.
That gap defines the moment.
Boards are funding experience. Consumers are optimizing for completion
Retail strategy still assumes that better experiences drive growth.
More content. More inspiration. More time spent inside the journey.
The behaviour is moving in a different direction.
Consumers approach shopping with intent. They define what they need before entering the journey. The role of the interface is to remove friction between intent and outcome.
“Consumers are very mission oriented today when it comes to the shopping journey. They know what they want… and they’re leveraging AI to help them find it as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
AI is already embedded in this process.
Consumers use it to locate products, compare options, and reduce the time required to make a decision. The value comes from compression. Fewer steps. Less time. Lower cognitive load.
“The less time they need to spend, the better, because it means they got their mission completed more quickly.”
This creates a structural tension.
Retail continues to invest in extending the journey.
Consumers are compressing it.
“Conventional retail wisdom would say that designing the most engaging… experience is what consumers want. But… consumers really want an efficient shopping experience.”
The result is misaligned execution.
Interfaces become heavier. Decision-making becomes faster.
At board level, this matters because capital allocation still reflects the previous model. Experience design, content production, and engagement metrics remain central.
The behaviour suggests a different priority.
Speed of resolution.
Clarity of information.
Confidence in the outcome.
“They’re using [AI] to find where they can buy the item… find the best deal… find the brands.”
Experience does not disappear. It changes function.
It becomes a delivery mechanism for certainty.
When it introduces friction, it underperforms.
Control over discovery? Control is already gone
Retail strategy still treats discovery as something that can be managed.
Channels are prioritised. Budgets are allocated. Attribution models are debated.
The assumption is that discovery can be directed.
The behaviour suggests otherwise.
Consumers no longer follow a linear path into a purchase. They move across search, marketplaces, social platforms, and increasingly AI interfaces, depending on the task at hand.
“We have entered a new era of omnichannel shopping… it’s another route to discovery for their brand.”
Search remains relevant. Social drives transactions. AI is emerging as an entry point.
These are not competing systems.
They are overlapping layers.
“29% said a search engine… 13%… starting their shopping journey via an agentic platform… 70%… have bought something through social media.”
The implication is structural.
Discovery is no longer upstream.
It happens inside the process.
Consumers arrive with intent, then encounter brands as part of execution.
“We’ve changed the path to purchase… it used to be discovery, research, buy. Now it’s research, discovery, buy.”
This shifts control.
Brands no longer fully determine how they are found.
Discovery increasingly happens through:
user-generated content
third-party interfaces
AI systems interpreting intent
“There’s aspects of discovery that you do have control over… and then there’s aspects… you simply won’t because it’s what other people are creating.”
At board level, this is often underestimated.
Investment decisions still reflect a belief in controllable funnels.
Campaigns. Channels. Optimisation.
The reality is less stable.
Discovery is becoming probabilistic.
It depends on how systems interpret relevance, not how brands position themselves.
“Some of that lack of control means that a new consumer… may discover your brand… in unanticipated ways.”
The response is not to prioritise one channel over another.
It is to accept that discovery has fragmented.
And to operate accordingly.
Presence across systems becomes a requirement.
Consistency of data becomes a constraint.
Control becomes partial.
Price is no longer a lever. It is infrastructure
End of the month.
One salary cycle. Finite budget. Decisions spaced more carefully.
The context shapes the behaviour before any brand interaction happens.
“UKNI consumers are more conservative with their spend… more interested in promotions and offers.”
This is not short-term pressure.
It is how purchasing decisions are structured.
Price becomes the first filter applied to any option.
“Price is really kind of the table stakes entry point into a consumer's consideration set.”
AI accelerates this filtering.
Comparison is immediate. Alternatives surface in seconds. Switching carries no friction.
The process compresses.
“They’re finding the best deal using AI… finding where they can buy the item.”
This changes the role of price.
It is no longer used to optimise conversion.
It determines whether a product is considered at all.
“If you're not priced the way the consumer expects… you get rolled out immediately.”
In a system where discovery is mediated by algorithms, price becomes part of visibility.
Not messaging. Not positioning.
Eligibility.
Dynamic pricing follows from this.
Not as an advantage, but as a requirement to remain competitive in real time.
“This will only increasingly become a part of consumers shopping futures… finding the best deals as quickly as possible.”
The concern has always been margin erosion.
The reality is operational.
Pricing moves from periodic decisions to continuous adjustment.
“Price is a sustainable competitive advantage… you should try to race to the bottom for as long as you possibly can.”
Most organisations are not structured for that.
The system is the constraint
A retailer adds AI to the front end.
Search improves. Recommendations become sharper. Interfaces feel faster.
Underneath, nothing changes.
Product data is inconsistent. Pricing is not real-time. Systems do not communicate.
The output improves. The system does not.
“The technology is kind of the behind the scenes… the dynamic pricing is the outcome.”
This is where most strategies break.
AI does not fix structural issues. It exposes them.
The more intelligence is added at the surface, the more visible the gaps become underneath.
“The dynamic pricing is the outcome… the AI is what the retailer is implementing behind the scenes.”
Execution starts to fragment.
One channel updates faster than another. Prices diverge. Availability lags. Information conflicts.
From the outside, it looks like inconsistency.
From the inside, it is system misalignment.
“There’s no world in which that’s going to be seamless anytime soon… you’ll have to see which partnerships become established.”
The pressure increases as new channels emerge.
Agentic commerce is not replacing existing systems. It is adding another layer that requires integration.
“Agentic commerce platforms are another channel… retailers should be thinking about it [that way].”
This shifts the bottleneck.
The constraint is no longer strategy.
It is infrastructure.
“Your data strategy is the foundation for all of this to work.”
And most organisations are not ready.
Not because they lack awareness.
Because their systems were not built for real-time, multi-channel, AI-mediated execution.
“Do an agentic commerce readiness audit… this future is not so far away.”
The gap is already visible.
It will widen quickly.
Want to learn more about Melissa’s work?
Check her out here
https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-minkow/
Download CI&T’s full report today
By surveying 2,000 diverse consumers across the UK and Ireland, we explore how shopping habits are changing thanks to the prevalence of AI, increased price sensitivity, and more seamless social commerce experiences.
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