Retailers are inundated with operational challenges today. But as they manage tariff turbulence and other immediate concerns, they can’t afford to lose sight of the long-term evolution of the strategic landscape.

The tectonic movements gradually reshaping the industry haven’t weakened during this period of economic and geopolitical flux. If anything, they’ve gotten more powerful.

Consider “beyond trade” expansion. More and more, retailers are diversifying from traditional buying and selling of goods, gaining access to new profit pools in areas such as retail media, third-party marketplaces, financial services, and logistics. We calculate that “beyond trade” activities accounted for 15% of sales and 25% of profit for retailers in 2024, up from 10% in both cases in 2021 (see Figure 1). At the same time, AI is giving retailers new tools to reinvent almost every element of their core retailing activities, including cost structure, customer experience, competitive differentiation, and much more.

Figure 1

Bain’s research across retail, consumer behavior, the application of artificial intelligence by retailers, and other fields convinces us that the industry will be comprehensively altered over the next 5 to 10 years by insistent, deep-lying changes such as these.

To help retailers prepare for the challenges and opportunities that will accompany this upheaval, we have constructed six provocative visions that could materialize over the next decade:

• Algorithms and robots will run your business.
• Customers will cheat on you with AI shopping agents.
• Value will become more personal and contextual.
• Grocers will become fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses.
• You might not need as many stores as you think.
• The hunt for scale will cross borders.

No one has a definitive view of the future, of course, and the evolution of the industry will vary by market, sector, format, and channel. The disruption at the heart of these visions, however, is already beginning or underway, setting the stage for what we believe can be a retail renaissance.

Algorithms and robots will run your business

Many retailers are already embracing artificial intelligence within their daily operations through innovations ranging from personalized pricing to digital twins that can simulate and optimize decisions. This is just the beginning for AI, a once-a-generation or maybe once-a-century technological disruption.

Not too far in the future, nearly every core retail process will be taken over by AI and physical forms of automation. Core activities such as merchandising, category management, pricing, and promotions will be performed by AI models that will make many decisions on autopilot.

This shift will amount to a commoditization of many of the core retail capabilities that have traditionally offered a competitive edge to the retailers that mastered them. With new entrants able to deploy the same expertise through off-the-shelf AI tools, incumbents are unlikely to win by trying to play by the old rules. If they don’t embrace cutting-edge automation, they will miss out on huge efficiencies and speed gains. Some functions might be able to handle their current workload in half the time required today.

Overall, retailers that don’t let algorithms and robots run key parts of their business might give away a few percentage points of profit margin. Bolder rivals will grab those savings and use them to gain new traction with shoppers, through reinvestment in lower prices, for instance.

Yet even as the age of autopilot dawns, human intelligence will still be needed to make the biggest decisions as well as to build, train, and validate AI models, among other things. Tomorrow’s industry leaders will find new ways to build a fresh competitive advantage, using their human talent in areas such as strategy, product design, and customer experience. Crucially, they’ll start helping their workforce acquire the necessary skills to leverage new technology and adapt today.

Customers will cheat on you with AI shopping agents

From a consumer’s perspective, shopping agents are likely to be one of the most exciting applications of AI over the coming years. Such agents will know a consumer’s preferences well enough to research and buy goods on their behalf without having to ask for permission, anticipating what they’ll need and when they’ll need it. For many time-pressed shoppers, the convenience will be compelling, especially for lower-cost items or in areas that need more complex support, such as planning meals in line with healthy eating guidance.

For retailers, however, AI shopping agents’ automated, brand-agnostic purchasing decisions could threaten their long-standing relationships with shoppers, posing one of their biggest strategic challenges of the coming decade.

Executive teams need to start planning today for the likely impact of AI shopping agents going mainstream. How would their sales and profit hold up if 20% to 30% of shoppers regularly devolve their purchasing decisions to AI agents, say? Retailers must also rethink how they go about attracting shoppers—for instance, information about a product will need to be structured in a way that makes it a top pick for AI agents (rather than optimizing such data for conventional search engines alone).

It’s early days, but we see two strategic paths emerging. A retailer could try to ward off the disintermediation threat by building its own AI shopping agent, which would require deep knowledge of the consumer across all aspects of their lives, including shopping, banking, travel, work, and leisure. Alternatively, retailers (particularly grocers) could position themselves with AI shopping agents as the go-to choice for replenishment shopping by nurturing a formidable compatibility with agents’ automated decision making.

Value will become more personal and contextual

With discount chains set to continue their rise, the pressure to keep prices low isn’t likely to abate in the coming decade. Fortunately for retailers, advances in technology are making new efficiencies possible, giving executive teams more room to cut costs and reinvest savings into winning on price (see the Bain Brief “Retail Efficiency Rewritten: New AI Tools Demand a Second Look at Your Costs”).

Of course, value has always meant more than just price; it can mean convenient delivery, the right product recommendation at exactly the right moment, and a host of other considerations. This broader definition of value is likely to become more personalized and contextually relevant over the coming decade. For example, what a shopper values on a Monday morning when they are rushing to get to work is different than what they value on the weekend when enjoying leisure time with family and friends.

Today’s digital tools are already helping retailers to discern better the different moments and shopping missions that make up a consumer’s life, providing them with much more personalized and relevant offers. Over the next few years, those tools are likely to become ever more powerful, making the challenge of serving a customer’s changing needs in real time as urgent as meeting their expectations on price. The retailers that excel at this will have great data (going well beyond transaction and loyalty data) that can offer a wraparound view of a consumer’s behavior as well as the data strategy and capabilities to harness it (see the Bain article “Data Strategy in Retail: The Gen AI Tipping Point”).

Grocers will become fast-moving consumer goods businesses

According to the latest research by Bain’s Global Consumer Lab, nearly half of grocery shoppers in the US and Europe now seek out private label products, rising to almost 60% in Spain (see Figure 2). Private label’s grocery market share hasn’t fully caught up with that enthusiasm: It varies from 20% in the US to between 30% and 50% in Europe. That share is growing enough, however, to make it worthwhile for executive teams to consider edgier scenarios in their strategic planning. For instance, what if tailwinds propelled private label to as much as 70% share in its strongest markets by 2035?

Figure 2

At that point, the boundary between retailers and FMCG manufacturers would be very blurry, with many grocers depending more on sales of their exclusive private label assortments (spanning categories and price tiers) than traditional third-party goods. But it isn’t just grocers that are set to overlap more with their suppliers. In categories such as apparel and home improvement tools, retailer-branded items should continue to thrive as consumers seek more value.

Overall, this boundary-blurring should provide opportunities for retailers. In the post-globalization era of supply chain fragility, making more of what you sell ought to improve resilience. Done well, private label will also offer retailers powerful differentiation in the form of must-have, exclusive products that can both pull in human shoppers and command the attention of AI agents.

But one of the challenges of the next 10 years for retailers will be to find a way to exploit the opportunities offered by private label brands without putting undue strain on their relationship with existing suppliers.

You might not need as many stores as you think

Many non-food retailers have closed stores in recent years and are likely to continue to do so. The correction of overcapacity is set to enter a new phase over the next decade, however, with grocers playing a more substantial role as they seek to optimize their capital allocation to serve the most urgent investment priorities.

Consider the US, where grocers have accelerated store openings since the Covid-19 pandemic at the same time as store space productivity went into reverse. That’s not a great platform for further investment in physical expansion. On the contrary, we calculate that the US grocery market would need to trim its retail space by about 10% and its store count by about 15% to return to peak historic productivity levels.

When changes in consumer behavior and other dynamics are also factored in, we suspect the coming wave of store closures will be more extensive than some executive teams expect. There will be exceptions, of course. Closures are likely to be most necessary for middle-market retailers. In grocery, discounters will probably keep adding to their physical store networks.

As closures progress, the role of remaining stores will need to evolve to reflect changing consumer behavior, the growth of e-commerce (with more stores becoming micro-fulfillment hubs, for instance), and the growth opportunities available outside traditional retailing activities.

With all this in mind, today’s executive teams should consider radical what-if scenarios involving substantial reductions in selling space and store numbers. How many stores are really needed to maintain market share? Which would be most worth keeping?

It can take years to close a store in a financially sound way, not least because of the capital expenditure required by such decommissioning. Grappling with extreme scenarios today can help retailers prepare better for this long-term challenge, which will also require executive teams to remain open to alternative uses for space, such as franchising or leasing to third-party traders.

The hunt for scale will cross borders

At Bain, we’ve long said that retailers need a different type of scale to succeed. Retailers (particularly grocers) have traditionally thrived if they possess local scale. But that local heft, while remaining vitally important, isn’t enough to fund the huge digital and data investments the industry must make nor the price investments also needed to keep up with consumers' expectations and competitive pressures.

Instead, retailers need to find a way to augment their local market strength with the sort of absolute scale that has propelled the biggest players in the industry. Amazon, Walmart, and Costco have consistently captured 15% to 50% of all retail growth in the US in recent years. That success owes much to their strategic and operational skill, but it’s also a product of their ability to invest more than smaller rivals because of their sheer size. Absolute scale is also allowing some big players to use M&A to turbocharge their capabilities beyond core retailing.

The current environment might seem hostile to retailers that want to build their own absolute scale. Domestic consolidation has been challenged recently by regulators in the US, while the dominant theme in international trade is one of tariff-led fragmentation. We wouldn’t be surprised, however, to see a rise in cross-border mergers and acquisitions in retail to add scale, create a more compelling return on technology investment, and access new markets. Even if procurement synergies were the only scale benefit in cross-border M&A—and they won’t be—such deals could still stack up given how procurement tends to account for 70% of a retailer’s costs.

Retailers will also have the option of building virtual scale through alliances with other players that stop short of a takeover or merger. But whichever form it takes, scale will still rule retail in 2035.

A new era of retail excellence

Retail is on the cusp of a profound reinvention that requires bold choices from executive teams over the next decade. Retailers need to embrace AI while retaining human judgment, personalize relevant value at scale, redefine the role of stores and networks, and build for scale beyond borders. The prize will be big for those that act early and reinvest strategically even as they mitigate today’s margin pressure. They won’t just weather the coming change; they’ll help shape a new era of retail excellence.