Artificial intelligence agents for dynamic pricing. Generative AI for making sense of in-store video data. And AI for keeping up with new tariff news.
These are some of the earliest areas where solution providers are aiding retailer customers on leveraging cutting-edge AI technology to increase revenue and improve operations, as detailed by three solution provider executives who spoke with CRN about retail AI’s early successes and continued obstacles.
At Teaneck, N.J.-based Cognizant–No. 8 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–leveraging AI studios and application building tools to go beyond consulting and services is a differentiator in the noisy channel partner space, Sushant Warikoo, the company’s senior vice president and global head of retail, told CRN in an interview.
“Typical labor-intensive consulting is dead,” he said. “If we don’t do it, somebody is going to do it.”
AI In Retail
The solution provider executives who spoke with CRN predicted that retail will be among the industries leading the AI revolution because of the volume of data they handle, the need to adopt technology early to stay ahead of competition amid razor-thin margins and the resilience of the in-store experience, which has survived the internet and the COVID-19 global pandemic.
In-store shopping still sees more sales dollars than online shopping, according to a 2024 CapitalOne report. American consumers spent $7 trillion in retail stores compared to $1 trillion online in 2023. An EY report that same year said that 57 percent of consumers want to see, touch and feel items before they buy them.
In January, Deloitte published a report that said retailers using GenAI tools like chatbots during Black Friday weekend saw a 15 percent better conversion rate. Seven in 10 retail executives expected to have AI capabilities in place within the year.
“We’ve always thought that stores will go away,” said Warikoo, whose company just reported first fiscal quarter revenue of $5.12 billion, up 7.5 percent year over year due in part to AI investments and took home Google’s 2025 award for retail industry solution services partners of the year. “They never went away. In fact, they’re as relevant as they were earlier.”
Global Tariff Impact
When asked about whether global tariffs have resulted in any slowdown on AI investments, Amol Ajgaonkar, chief technology officer of product innovation at Chandler, Ariz.-based Insight–a member of CRN’s MSP Elite 150–told CRN in an interview that it is too early to tell.
Anil Hanumanthappa (pictured above), vice president and head of the Americas consumer and retail practice for India-based Wipro–No. 15 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that he has so far seen AI investments continue despite economic uncertainty.
“That is needed, not just for AI, but even the basic analytics for insights and how you run the business on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “Customers are realizing the importance of having the foundation ready for whenever they will leverage that in the future.”
The uncertainty for AI in the new economic reality is also reflected in a new report by IPED, the channel consulting arm of CRN parent The Channel Company. Interviews with technology vendors showed that some worry that global tariffs will impact significant AI-related pipelines while others anticipate growth. Quarterly vendor earnings calls from Google, Microsoft, IBMand others in the weeks since President Donald Trump implemented global tariffs point to AI projects, at least for now, remaining resilient.
Cognizant’s AI Agents
One of Cognizant’s forays into the agentic AI wave taking over technology is dynamic pricing agents that can apply data to a particular product at a particular time. Agents can help take product description and inventory updates from suppliers down to hours from weeks, Warikoo said.
“That is how business workflows are changing,” he said. “Now you have the ability to bring in new products, new descriptions, new pricing in a much faster manner because the technology helped you do that. … We’re not just trying to catch up. We’re not just trying to keep up. We’re not just trying to address what is there today. I think what we are creating is the future.”
The solution provider–whose other recent accolades include a 2024 Microsoft global systems integrator (GSI) partner of the year award for the U.S. and a 2024 Salesforce AI partner innovation award–has also leveraged agents to address simpler customer issues on contact center calls, freeing up humans for more complex cases.
Cognizant has also sought a leadership role in the adoption of small language models (SLMs) as a more compute-efficient and cost-efficient strategy for AI, especially for industry-specific use cases leveraging specific datasets. SLMs are part of the equation for reducing AI “hallucinations” and inaccurate results, Warikoo said.
He’s seen concerns around data privacy and AI vendor use of data subside as Cognizant educates customers on how GenAI works and how they can anonymize data and keep data from leaving physical locations if desired.
As far as original IP goes, Cognizant this year launched Stores 360, which uses Cognizant’s Neuro AI platform and ServiceNow technology for improved store operations, enhanced employee productivity and better customer experiences, Warikoo said.
Insight’s Next-Evolution Computer Vision
While computer vision for helping retailers make sense of where customers shop at given times of the day isn’t new, GenAI is finally helping users make sense of the visual data, taking in queries in natural language and providing insights in a manner understandable to a business user, Insight’s Ajgaonkar said.
“Now I can take unstructured data and make sense out of it or help clean it or provide trends around that unstructured data,” said Ajgaonkar, whose recent company accolades include Microsoft’s 2024 Surface solution area partner of the year for the U.S. and AI and Copilot innovation business transformation partner of the year for Canada.
Insight has seen customers leverage its technology in this area to look at how often people at gas stations buy gas and then shop in the convenience store and vice versa, or track customer wait time in lines before check out, prevent retail theft or track the demographics of who shops in a particular aisle.
“From a technology point of view, it’s a straightforward use case,” Ajgaonkar said. “But the impact could be really great.”
Ajgaonkar believes the AI market overall has matured now that it is in the third year since OpenAI publicly released its ChatGPT text-generating tool. He finds that customers that were once too afraid of how AI vendors use their data have a better understanding of the technology and are more comfortable with experimenting.
Insight has helped customers use existing hardware investments to bring AI use cases to life and even decide between cloud AI models and local AI models for especially sensitive data and for cost efficiency.
“It has helped them ease their minds on security concerns,” he said.
Insight’s results from trying out AI internally first has also helped build trust with more AI skeptical customers.
“Building credibility by actually demonstrating what we’ve done and how we use it internally, that unlocks a few doors for us with newer customers,” he said.
For customers who don’t yet feel the early-mover advantage of adopting AI early, their early efforts in building an AI strategy and incremental investments in adoption will help them stay ahead of competition that hasn’t even started experimenting with the technology.
“People who are waiting are actually going to be left behind much faster and a long distance behind,” he said. “And even when you catch up, it’s too late.”
Wipro’s Tariff AI Agents
Speaking of tariffs, Wipro introduced this year an agentic AI offer that leverages optical character recognition (OCR) and advanced pattern recognition for quick tariff verification–especially relevant given the recent rapid change in global policies.
The AI determines what country an item came from, what tariff applies, runs a compliance check and risk assessment and corrects in real time, said Wipro’s Hanumanthappa–whose company has earned recent accolades including Oracle’s 2024 global partner of the year in cloud and technology innovation and Databricks’ innovation partner of the year.
“This platform can adapt future changes to tariffs as things change,” he said. “We are seeing a lot of interest with our customers.”
Along with navigating global tariffs, Wipro’s retail AI has helped customers prevent theft in stores and replenish inventory, reviewing vendor contracts for which supplier is best for placing an order–with a human performing the final review.
“Going forward, a lot of that is going to further get automated without human intervention,” he predicted.
The earliest AI adopters among Wipro’s customers are seeing benefits from their early investment, Hanumanthappa said. An electronics retailer Wipro worked with about two years ago has seen AI bring a 25 percent increase in its net promoter score (NPS) and reduce customer merchandise returns to 4 percent from 16 percent, in one example.
An apparel retailer customer used Wipro AI offers to create better product bundles to increase the average basket size customers purchase, he said.
Wipro’s AI offers have helped bring in new customers, especially where the incumbent solution provider has lagged in learning about new AI technology, he said.
Wipro has also built IP in the AI era with its ai360 platform as an example. The solution provider has even helped AI vendors with model development, content moderation and output verification, he said. That goes for some of the largest AI players, such as Nvidia, and more niche players such as RELX.
What’s Next
The solution providers told CRN that they are excited for voice-based AI products to pick up in use.
Wipro’s Hanumanthappa said an emerging AI use case is AI-assisted store design to optimize physical spaces for foot traffic and sales conversion.
Insight’s Ajgaonkar said he expects AI agent use cases to explode as more users adopt AI vendor Anthropic’s standardized model context protocol (MCP) servers, bringing choice and flexibility to AI agent users akin to what OpenAI brought with its application programming interface (API) standard for models.
Cognizant’s Warikoo said that he is excited for companies to start adopting data fabrics to bring data together in real time for improved insights.
“You won’t have to spend millions and millions of dollars trying to get into a data lake and then build a model and then build a report out,” he said. “You’ll be able to drive insights with self-evolving data models on a very regular basis. … “Insights can help you figure out where to open the store, where we will get a bigger bang for the buck, how to save that extra $5 or $2 or $3 in your labor cost in the store. All of this is super important.”
Source: https://www.crn.com/
