AI could cause $1.6 trillion impact by 2030 — these retailers lead

The top 207 North American public retailers and restaurants could see nearly $1.6 trillion financial impact through the end of the decade, according to the “2024 AI Readiness Index” from analyst firm IHL Group. The index provides an AI readiness score comparison (from 0-100) as well as potential financial impact for individual companies from sales growth, gross margin improvement, and sales/general administrative cost improvement.

The leaders in each retail segment covered by the index in terms of readiness score and potential benefit by 2030 are:

• E-commerce – Amazon (85.4, $353.7 billion).
• Fast moving consumer goods – Walmart (77, $264.2 billion)
• Apparel/shoes – Lululemon (highest score – 63.2), Nike (Highest potential -benefit $18.4 billion).
• Hard goods – Home depot (65, $57 billion).
• Health and beauty – CVS (63, $132.4 billion).
• Restaurant chains – Chipotle (highest score – 56.7), Starbucks (highest score – 56.7 and highest potential benefit– $9.8 billion).

“AI is already transforming the retail market behind the scenes with traditional AI/machine learning improvements,” said Greg Buzek, president of IHL Group, in an email to Chain Store Age. “Generative AI simply adds to that potential financial impact, but there are wide disparities among retailers on readiness.”

Research includes rankings for the companies in several segments and is composed of a nine-part algorithm for rating companies (0-100) based on data maturity, analytics maturity, alignment with key vendors, scale (revenues) and free cash flow as well as other measures from public and private research. This is then combined with the latest annual financial results for companies to project potential financial impact from 2022-2029.

Chain Store Age