Retail has never had more data, but at the same time, it’s never known its customers less, says Lee Nolan, GM UK&I at Hitachi Vantara.

In recent years, personalisation has become one of retail’s most overused promises, he explains. From tailored product recommendations to curated browsing experiences, brands routinely claim to know their customers better than ever.

Yet for many shoppers, the reality still feels generic, inconsistent and often irrelevant. We have all received the email recommending an item we bought last week, or seen the homepage that ignores everything we have ever browsed.

The issue is not a lack of ambition, however. Few sectors have invested as heavily in customer data, AI and martech as retail. The problem is that much of this investment sits on data that does not talk to itself.

Customer information is typically scattered across ecommerce platforms, in-store systems, loyalty programmes, marketing tools and service channels, leaving retailers with a partial and often outdated view of the individual. The result is so-called personalisation that is based on assumption rather than real insight.

Fragmentation is holding retailers back

A retailer might know what a customer purchased online, but not what they returned in store. They might know what a shopper clicked in last week’s email, but not the long browsing session they had on the app that morning. They might know a customer’s loyalty tier, but not the conversation they just had with a contact centre agent.

Each of these systems was built for a specific purpose at a specific point in time. Stitching them together has proved harder than anyone ever expected. Until that stitching happens, every layer of AI, every recommendation engine and every targeting model is reading from an incomplete script. The more sophisticated the model, the more visible the gaps become to the customer.

You can’t personalise your way out of poor data

Our recent global study points to a useful shift in mindset. When asked what made their AI projects successful, 67% of UK businesses pointed to high-quality data, well above the global average of 48%. More striking still, that figure had jumped 26 percentage points in a single year. This shows that UK business leaders are clearly learning, often the hard way, that AI is only as good as the data feeding it.

For retail, this is the lesson that matters most. You cannot personalise your way out of poor data. No amount of clever modelling will rescue a recommendation engine that sees only half of the customer. If brands want personalisation to feel real, they need to invest as much in the plumbing as they do in the polish.

The foundations for real personalisation

The retailers getting this right are the ones rethinking their data foundations rather than buying yet another point solution. They are unifying customer data across channels, applying consistent governance, and giving their teams a single, trusted view of the customer that updates in something close to real time.

This involves modernising legacy infrastructure, breaking down ownership disputes between marketing, ecommerce and store operations, and being honest about which data sources can actually be trusted. It also means treating data quality as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-off project.

The pay-off, if done correctly, is significant. When a retailer can see the whole customer, personalisation stops feeling like guesswork and starts feeling like recognition. Recommendations become useful rather than mysterious. Service becomes proactive rather than reactive. Loyalty starts to follow naturally, because customers feel understood and not tracked.

A more honest conversation about personalisation

Retail does not need more conversations about personalisation – it needs honest discussions about the data underneath it.

The retail brands that win the next decade will not be the ones with the most sophisticated AI models. They will be the ones with the cleanest, most connected data, and the discipline to keep it that way.

Until then, personalisation will remain one of retail’s biggest promises and also one of its biggest disappointments.