Retail leaders are basically saying: if your stack doesn’t speak AI in 2026, you’re leaving money on the table.
Retail execs from places like Target, Lowe’s, and a bunch of DTC brands are all converging on the same point: AI isn’t a side project anymore; it’s the roadmap. Surveys they cite say 97% of retailers plan to maintain or increase AI investments, and a huge chunk of shoppers already used AI to help with holiday buying in 2025.[3] This isn’t “maybe we’ll try a chatbot someday”—this is “AI is baked into pricing, promo optimization, supply chain visibility, security, and marketing.”[3]
The detail that really jumped out to me as a dev: one brand calls out Shopify’s latest Winter Editions drop as a big unlock.[3] Shopify is exposing a custom API that plugs into OpenAI/ChatGPT, letting merchants control how their products appear inside ChatGPT and tune the surrounding content.[3] On top of that, Shopify is letting brands build custom internal apps and workflows to analyze store data, react to inventory trends, and automate ops.[3] That’s basically “LLM-native commerce integrations” landing in the hands of any developer who can write a Shopify app.
If you build anything for e‑commerce—apps, data pipelines, recommendation systems—this is your bat signal. You can wire up agents to watch inventory anomalies and auto-propose campaigns, build tools that generate and A/B test on-page copy, or create per-merchant “views” that are optimized for how ChatGPT will surface their catalog. And because most of this sits behind APIs, you don’t need to be employed by Target to play; you can be the dev shipping the tools that mid-sized brands rely on.
The honest take: a lot of “AI for retail” right now is still just fancy autocomplete plus dashboards with better copy. But with this much budget and operational surface area being handed to AI, the first teams that ship useful, not just shiny, LLM features are going to set the patterns everyone else copies. If you had to pick one AI feature to build for retail this year—internal ops, shopper-facing, or analytics—where would you start?
Source: Modern Retail