SAP has announced its new AI-enhanced retail operating system ahead of the NRF 2026 event next week.
Launching later this year, the Retail Intelligence solution is designed to drive better customer experiences by integrating core retail systems for operational and customer engagement purposes.
This solution is designed to deliver reliability and consistency across the customer journey, enabling a seamless, omnichannel experience.
Speaking with CX Today, Jessica Keehn, CMO of SAP CX, highlighted that the solution helps retailers manage operations end-to-end with improved consistency, lower manual effort, and stronger analytical and automation capabilities.
“[This] allows our retail customers to run their operations end-to-end so much more effectively, consistently, and with so much less man power than is needed today.
“Its all done through high quality data layered with AI and insights that you can’t do unless you have that consolidated into one place.”
The Retail Intelligence solution will be launched directly into SAP Business Data Cloud, enhancing its current capabilities by transforming data into actionable intelligence, unifying real-time data from both internal and third-party sources.
These sources include sales, inventory, customers, and suppliers, ensuring accuracy and issue prevention when the relevant data is aligned.
From here, the solution simulates the data, modelling the likelihood of how that data will behave under different conditions.
This solution shifts CX teams from reactive to proactive, by testing customer risks before impact, this assures product reliability and consistency across channels, improving customer trust.
Furthermore, this solution also aims to enhance SAP’s retail and fashion suite, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, a foundational platform that manages retail and fashion operations with greater intelligence and speed.
As part of its new generation of innovations, SAP will also launch its natural language capability, Natural Language Assortment Management, into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, utilizing the AI assistant, Joule, for manual intervention in creating, modifying, or retiring assortments using natural language.
This makes the system more accessible to users and positively affects the market it’s trying to dominate, achieving speedier responses to market shifts and allowing for real-time adjustments to trend changes.
Other capabilities also include enhancing SAP’s omnichannel abilities by designing a single, closed-loop operating system unifying data and AI to ensure seamless advancements.
As a closed-loop retail model, this AI-native solution is designed to facilitate faster decision-making, stronger fulfillment reliability, and consistent omnichannel experiences for both retailers and direct-to-consumer businesses.
By functioning as an agentic orchestration, this reduces fragmentation for retailers by operating data and AI agents together across an enterprise and avoiding disconnection.
This solution will also enhance service team communication and enable customers to access support across multiple environments, while maintaining a frictionless experience.
Balaji Balasubramanian, President & Chief Product Officer for Customer Experience & Consumer Industries, SAP SE,
“Retailers face a landscape where AI is no longer optional,” he said.
“SAP provides one closed-loop, AI-enhanced retail operating system that ties planning, execution, and engagement together.
“We put data and AI at the heart of retail, delivering speed, personalization, and growth across every channel and segment.”
Other omnichannel capabilities also include centralizing promotional pricing offers across sales channels both online and in-store.
By setting up promotion rules and managing pricing offers, this creates a consistent customer experience across all channels and reduces pricing errors.
This ensures that pricing remains accurate across customer shops and reduces customer unfairness.
What This Means For Retail
This solution to improving retail experience ensures numerous practical shifts for the customer journey.
As CX becomes more consistent across channels, this reduces mismatches between customers experiences and what the retailers are trying to deliver.
These include fewer item stockouts, promotional errors, and increased reliability in orders when decisions are made from shared, real-time data.
And with higher item availability, this increases fulfillment and seamlessness in the customer journey as fewer limitations occur.
This solution also allows for increased customization for the customer journey, increasing personalization limitations from just marketing or the storefront.
With faster omnichannel capabilities, retailers can provide real-time offers that reflect personal or local demand.
Proactive services now offer further seamlessness in the customer journey, by identifying order issues before they reach the customer, this ensures faster resolutions over reactive apologies.
These capabilities drive loyalty through consistency and fewer failures, where reliability becomes the forefront of the customer journey.
