The Retail CXO Outlook:
Roadmap to 2030
The next era of retail will not be won on strategy alone. It will be won on execution and the foundation built underneath it. See what 336 global executives reveal about AI readiness, margin pressure, operating resilience, and the capabilities that will separate the retailers who stay ahead from those who fall behind.
Based on a survey of 336 C-suite executives across four regions and three retail formats, in partnership with Incisiv and World Retail Congress.
Retail just got harder.
AI is changing how shoppers discover. Margin is under pressure from volatility, disruption and rising cost-to-serve. And the customer promise is no longer made in the brand story alone. It is made in execution.
The gap the data exposes is not one of ambition. Nearly every CXO surveyed believes AI will reshape how decisions get made by 2030. Far fewer have the unified data, talent, and governance foundation to scale it. AI deployed into a fragmented stack amplifies complexity. AI deployed on a unified foundation compounds performance.
For C-suite leaders, the question is not whether the market is shifting. It is whether your organization is built to move with it faster, smarter, and at scale.
Based on a survey of 336 global executives across four regions and three retail formats, this report, in partnership with Incisiv and World Retail Congress, reveals where retail leaders are placing their bets, where readiness is falling short, and what it will take to compete through 2030.
What you’ll learn from the report
Get a clear view of where retail is heading, where your peers are placing their bets and which capabilities matter most if you want to protect margin, move faster and compete with confidence through 2030.
You’ll learn:
- Why AI is now a competitive requirement and why most retail organizations still are not built to scale it.
- How AI-led discovery is putting brand visibility, traffic, and conversion under pressure before shoppers ever reach your channels.
- Where enterprise retailers are most exposed, from fulfillment and resilience to decision speed, cross-channel execution, and leadership readiness.
- Which seven capabilities will define the retailers best positioned to protect margin, build loyalty, and out-execute the market through 2030.
- How leading executives are thinking about investment priorities across customer experience, AI, supply chain, and transformation.
Who Should Read This Report?
It is a sharp, executive-level view of where the market is moving and what separates organizations that are built to respond from those that are built to react.
If you own strategy, commerce, operations, supply chain, customer experience, technology, or transformation, this research will help you pressure-test your roadmap against the realities reshaping retail now.
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Frequently Asked Questions
The Retail CXO Outlook: Roadmap to 2030 is Manhattan Associates' executive research report on the state of retail readiness for the next era of competition. Produced in partnership with Incisiv and World Retail Congress, it distills insights from 336 global C-suite executives into a clear view of where retail leaders are placing their bets, where readiness is falling short, and what it will take to lead through 2030.
The report covers the forces reshaping retail execution, including AI adoption and readiness, margin pressure, operational resilience, cross-channel fulfillment, decision speed, leadership priorities, and investment plans. It also identifies the seven capabilities that will define the retailers best positioned to protect margin, build loyalty, and out-execute the market through 2030.
The research is based on responses from 336 C-suite executives across four regions and three retail formats. Respondents represent strategy, commerce, operations, supply chain, customer experience, technology, and transformation leadership at enterprise retail organizations worldwide.
AI is now a competitive requirement in retail, not a future initiative. Nearly every executive surveyed sees AI as table stakes by 2030, yet fewer than one in three say they have the unified data, talent, and governance foundation to scale enterprise AI. That gap between belief and readiness is where competitive separation will happen. AI deployed into a fragmented stack amplifies complexity. AI deployed on a unified foundation compounds performance, and the retailers who close that gap first will make faster, sharper decisions than competitors still laying the groundwork.
Most supply chain and commerce software connects the dots between systems. A unified platform removes the dots entirely. When every domain, order, store, warehouse, transportation, and planning, shares the same data in real time, AI has an operational truth to reason from and a governed layer to act through. On a fragmented stack, every system-to-system handoff introduces delay, approximation, and error, and AI amplifies whatever is already broken. The report shows the readiness gap is less a talent problem than an architecture problem, and it explains what the retailers closing that gap are doing differently.
The report identifies seven capabilities that separate leading retailers from the rest, spanning AI-ready data and talent foundations, unified commerce execution, resilient supply chain and fulfillment, real-time decisioning, customer experience differentiation, adaptive operating models, and transformation leadership. Download the full report for the complete framework, benchmarks, and executive guidance.