Retail and QSR leaders are grappling with workforce shortages, changing customer behavior, and new cybersecurity challenges. This report explores how they're overcoming those obstacles through connected technology, leveraging agentic AI, unified commerce, edge-powered stores, IoT, and advanced cybersecurity. We'll delve into the innovative technologies that are poised to define the next wave of retail, addressing the challenges of integration and the opportunities for differentiation in an increasingly competitive market.
This report explores how:
- AI agents are becoming more embedded, as consumers use them to make purchases independently on their behalf, while retailers can use them to monitor and optimize inventory and operations.
- Retail success hinges on unified commerce—better experiences, better views of the customer, and a direct line between the front of the house and operations.
- Retailers and QSR leaders are exploring how workloads like AI, IoT, and computer vision can be optimized through in-store servers and edge compute.
- IoT at scale feeds the loop, as smart shelves, and sensors can unlock real-time insights.
- With more endpoints and machine identities, layered defenses, zero-trust, and controls become non-negotiable.