Retail is quietly entering its next major transformation: the era of operational excellence. During the 2020s, we’ve moved through the eras of optimising availability, to pricing, and now, to operational excellence. This will continue to be the battleground for retailers, says Tom Summerfield, Director of Revenue at Peak, a UiPath company.

Executives are under pressure to find profit in low-growth markets and do more with less. Levi’s is a recent example of leading this trend. Despite cutting 200 jobs, the brand raised its profit guidance in October, with revenue now expected to grow 3% this year. The company is shrinking some teams but simultaneously increasing its output. Efficiency, not expansion, is driving growth.

While lots of hype centres on improving the customer experience, operational excellence has to come first. In turn, this will aid a better customer experience.

But why is this change taking place? And, more importantly, how?

Low growth driving team reductions

Low growth means there’s more quiet restructuring going on. I know from private conversations that boardrooms are asking their teams to achieve more with less and cut down the size of their own teams – even when team leaders feel they need more hires, not less people. Instead, profits will emerge from cost savings. This is going to test retail leaders to think more deeply about the shapes of their teams: how can they set them up to be lean but effective for the next few years?

There’s not much public data to back this up, because it’s highly private, but it’s happening – everyone knows it is. The Levi’s example is a case in point. But the key factor under all of this is that if you want to grow better, building operational excellence and leaner teams, you need tech. And not just any tech: only advanced technology, specifically agentic AI, will be helping Levi’s to achieve these results.

If retailers can harness technology that means they don’t need to have a bloated number of merchandisers, then that’s going to be of interest to them. Agentic AI provides this capability.

Agentic AI: the heart of operational excellence

Operational excellence is required to break through low growth. In particular, there is the very practical reality of needing to get people off spreadsheets, which are arduous and manual. Teams are consuming data, even advanced price elasticity outputs (which are what help merchandisers make intelligent pricing decisions), in spreadsheets. All the good work is being undone by how data is being consumed – they have to sift through thousands and thousands of rows of data to gather insights. Everyone talks about overcoming manual processes and spreadsheets, but no-one’s truly solved it in tech yet.

This is where agentic AI is creating seismic change. A key component of agentic AI is AI agents – these perform specific tasks, while agentic AI is the orchestration of multiple AI agents to achieve a broader goal. The amazing thing about AI agents is that they can act autonomously and carry out tasks on behalf of humans to achieve a goal.

So, in this context, AI agents can prepare outputs for the retailer in a consumable format and then execute actions, rather than teams spending all of their Monday downloading countless spreadsheets and synthetising data. Jobs that take hours suddenly take 15 minutes, dramatically reducing the time people spend in spreadsheets.

Agentic AI is the growth lever: intelligent systems take on the manual lift so humans can focus on decisions and strategy. Retailers using agentic AI can then grow their business without growing their headcount in a linear way (or growing their headcount at a lesser rate). With technology handling large parts of merchandising processes intelligently, it enables them to redesign and reorganise their teams around these processes.

One of agentic AI’s main benefits is that it helps retailers understand what’s happening with more agility, massively enhancing their reporting capability and knowledge of their data. It creates a control tower-like mentality: AI agents allow you to pull the strings from the control tower rather than getting lost in the details of data and processes.

That is the power of operational excellence. It’s about organisational redesign rather than job replacement. Above all, the retailers who are using AI will win over those who aren’t – this is indicative of the entire future of merchandising.

Leaner, data-driven teams the winning formula

In 2026, the progressive, more technically advanced and data mature retailers will continue to grow, as there’s plenty of commerce available to capitalise on – especially in the UK, where the economy is more stable now. They will indulge an openness to evolving their team structures more deliberately, with data at the heart of them. They will have more muscle memory and appreciation of what sophisticated tech projects can deliver and will pull away from their competitors financially.

Above all, the retailers that reorganise around leaner, data-driven teams by using agentic AI will dominate 2026’s peak seasons.