For every dollar of revenue, approximately 5 cents are lost or at risk because the organisation cannot respond fast enough. The latency tax is not a market condition, it is an operating model choice. The 3-cent gap between leaders and the industry is not a cost to manage. It is value waiting to be recovered, a release from Incisiv said.
This survey of 298 retail supply chain and merchandise planning executives reveals a persistent pattern: the industry has invested heavily in visibility, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), yet the time between identifying a problem and acting on it has barely improved.
Top North American and EMEA retailers average 71 per cent full-price sell-through compared to 57 per cent for the industry overall—a gap driven by how quickly they act on demand signals, a survey found.
The industry has invested heavily in visibility, analytics and AI, yet the time between identifying a problem and acting on it has barely improved.
For every dollar of revenue, 5 cents are lost or at risk.
Organisations know more than ever, but they are not acting faster, the 2026 Retail Resilience & AI Adoption Study conducted by industry insights and strategy firm Incisiv in partnership with the World Retail Congress and Anaplan, revealed the survey.
“Our research shows that the organizations pulling ahead have restructured accountability and given systems the authority to act. The performance gap between them and the rest of the industry is now measurable in full-price revenue—and it is growing,” said Gaurav Pant, chief insights officer at Incisiv.
Two-thirds of retailers estimate they lose 3 per cent or more of annual sales because they cannot respond quickly enough to demand shifts, with a third putting that figure above 6 per cent. For a billion-dollar retailer, that translates to more than $60 million in annual losses.
The study traces the source: 69 per cent of organisations rebalance inventory monthly or less frequently, and 78 per cent adjust upstream supply quarterly or slower—even when demand signals are available in real time.
“This research makes clear that the competitive divide in global retail is no longer about who has the best forecast. It is about who can turn insight into action fastest — and that requires a fundamentally different operating model,” said Ian McGarrigle, chairman of World Retail Congress.
AI’s perceived value in retail planning is near-universal—more than 85 per cent of executives rate it as critical across retail functions—but a 60-percentage-point gap exists between importance and actual deployment.
Only 31 per cent have deployed AI in demand forecasting, and just 13 per cent in exception management, where speed matters most.
The workforce dimension is equally stark. Executives expect more than half of all supply chain and merchandise planning roles to require fundamentally different skills by 2030, yet only 11 per cent of teams have received any AI training to date.
Organisations that fail to close this gap risk one of two outcomes: teams that distrust AI and override it, or teams that accept its outputs without the judgment to know when it is wrong.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)
