Impact of AI on the Retail Workforce

A focused webinar designed to equip senior leaders, HR professionals, and workforce strategists with the insights and tools needed to thrive in this dynamic environment.

20 April 20264 Minute Read

In today’s rapidly evolving retail landscape, staying ahead means anticipating disruption, adapting with agility, and building resilient organizations from within, and little is more uncertain than AI's impact in the retail workforce.

Dive into AI’s impact on the workforce in this on-demand webinar, exploring the practical insights retailers need to champion these breakthroughs while truly supporting their people through the change.

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The impact of AI on the retail workforce

AI offers potential productivity gains up to 50% when integrated with the right operating model, mindset, skillset and toolset, but cannot deliver its full value in isolation.

AI will not replace all jobs. Instead, it will change every role; AI will optimise supply chains, enable hyper-personalisation, transform e-commerce and challenge future retail strategies. AI provides new opportunities for us to design retail work in the most effective, strategic way.

Challenges include high upfront investment, skills gaps, slow adoption, and potential negative impacts on employee experience and customer relationships due to reduced human touch. The retail sector also faces generational workforce shifts, with automation reducing entry-level roles.

Employer readiness: what you should do now

Successful AI transformation starts with alignment to business strategy

Understanding the work and transforming it through automation and augmentation to build the optimal human-AI partnership
Leveraging existing capabilities when redeploying talent to the most strategic activities
Optimising the shape, size and composition of your teams to ensure compelling customer and employee experiences in the most efficient way

HR often leads as the initial adopter

Focus more on behavioural skills such as storytelling, influencing, data interpretation and relationship management
Digital literacy and cybersecurity are critical workforce skills, with recent high-profile data breaches underscoring the importance of robust security practices. The greatest threat = people and human error.
Employee listening and designing work experiences are vital, as 62% of employees feel leaders underestimate AI’s emotional and psychological impacts.

How Marsh can support you on your journey

Work Design & Organisation Design: Reinvent jobs for the future and align team structure, size and shape to the newly designed work to enable agility, innovation and productivity
Future-fit employee listening Robust listening tools with Mercer’s extensive database and deep expertise across HR, reward and transformation to evolve the employee experience
Make better people decisions using skill assessment A skills‑assessment approach helps organisation identify gaps, accelerate employee development, and drive strategic workforce planning
Job architecture: Building structure into an evolving world Establish a robust career architecture framework with consistent job analysis and job evaluation methodology.