Retailers are about to get swamped with AI agents that are designed to boost efficiency and enhance customer experiences if news out of NRF 2025 is any indicator.

NRF 2025 in New York has a heavy dose of AI across the supply chain to distribution to customer experiences. Adobe in its holiday shopping report noted that consumers embraced generative AI chat bots as customer assistants and led to a 1,300% increase in traffic to retail sites.

IBM in a recent study found that retail and consumer product companies are shifting spending toward AI. IBM found that retail and consumer product companies will allocate an average of 3.32% of their revenue to AI to enhance customer service, supply chain and marketing.

With that backdrop, here's a roundup of what's being pitched to retailers for 2025.

Salesforce launched Agentforce for Retail with features that couple in-store and digital shopping. Agentforce for Retail includes new prebuilt skills for order management, guided shopping, appointment scheduling and marketing skills for loyalty promotion creation. Salesforce also launched Retail Cloud with Modern POS. 

Google Cloud launched Agentspace for Retailers, which gives retailers one place to combine the company's agentic AI tools, Gemini models and search. In addition, Google Cloud outlined Vertex AI Search for Commerce and Google Cloud Gen AI Catalog and Content Enrichment. Google also said it would bring its Vision AI to physical retailers via a partnership with Everseen Partners. Also: Google Cloud launches Agentspace to create, deploy agents

Blue Yonder launched its December platform update that features "AI-centric data modeling." Blue Yonder added integrated demand and supply planning with AI and machine learning updates to combine supply chain, financial operations and risk and opportunity scenarios. A few items in the December release include:

  • One view of online and in-store inventory.
  • Support for vertically integrated retailers.
  • Enhanced returns orchestration with integrations between warehouse management, commerce and returns management.
  • AI tools added across the platform to cover inventory optimization and planning for demand, business and supply chain.

Talkdesk announced Talkdesk AI Agents for Retail, which aims to bring agentic AI to retail customer service. These conversational agents are designed to handle retail processes autonomously and take action.

Crisp, a company that specializes in retail analytics, launched AI Blueprints, a suite of open-source AI templates for consumer product group companies. The AI Blueprints aim to automate manual tasks, simplify processes and harmonize data. The AI Blueprints are free and run within Databricks and Google Cloud with Snowflake on deck.

Planalytics announced Xtreme, a set of applications that uses AI to forecast consumer demand to significant weather events such as hurricanes, flooding, heat waves and cold snaps. Planalytics also co-authored a report with NRF on climate proofing retail.

Zebra Technologies outlined the Zebra Mobile Computing AI Suite, a set of development tools to bring AI vision to Zebra Android Devices. Zebra also said the AI tools integrated into Zebra Companion, a suite of AI agents designed for retail frontline workers.

More retail:

 

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Marketing Transformation, Matrix Commerce, Next-Generation Customer Experience

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

#AI #artificialintelligence #machinelearning #ML #generativeAI, omnichannel retail