AWS for Industries: Five Critical Technology Trends for Retailers in 2025
Walking through the bustling vendor booths at NRF’s Big Show, several recurring themes caught my eye – patterns that are poised to redefine the retail landscape in the coming years. Although the topics themselves weren’t entirely new, the approaches to addressing familiar use cases certainly were. Here are five themes that I believe have the potential to fundamentally transform retail businesses.
1. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)
While discussing these trends, it’s impossible to ignore generative AI. Today, retailers are moving beyond the experimental stages of generative AI and focusing on rapidly scaling use cases that offer tangible benefits. Notably, Amazon is successfully employing generative AI to assist consumers and sellers in video creation and to enhance its smart shopping assistant, Amazon Rufus.
One particularly successful application of generative AI centers around improving product catalog data. By automating the collection of product attributes, retailers can enrich product descriptions and provide more accurate search results. For example, Nykaa, a popular lifestyle retailer in India, previously had 300 employees reviewing product listings for data inaccuracies. Automating this process has reduced errors, increased accuracy, and accelerated the process of getting new products listed.
While there are many potential generative AI applications—such as virtual shopping assistants and product image manipulation—these examples stood out as particularly impactful.
2. Agentic AI
Agentic AI, which exceeds the capabilities of everyday chatbots, represents a significant advancement. These AI agents can be tailored to specific industries or tasks, while also possessing general capabilities. Gartner forecasts that by 2028, agentic AI will autonomously handle 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions, a considerable increase from the zero percent observed in 2024¹.
There are several advantages to using agentic AI. First, the agents are autonomous and can execute tasks without human intervention. Second, they employ chain-of-thought reasoning within Large Language Models (LLMs) to break down complex problems. Finally, they can call upon tools to assist with task completion. Agentic AI goes beyond generating text and images to perform real actions on your behalf.
Of note are domain-specific agents. Salesforce, for example, now incorporates agentic AIs with specialized skills through Agentforce. It is the agentic layer of Salesforce’s platform, designed to facilitate better customer relationships and serve as an always-on digital workforce. Another example, highlighted in guidance from AWS, features the use of Amazon Bedrock Agents as shopping assistants to provide product recommendations and add items to a virtual cart.
Looking forward, AI-powered agents will likely specialize in forecasting, product reorders, invoice processing, pricing, and other areas where there is a need for reasoning capabilities.
3. Retail Media Networks
Amazon has been running ads about its storefront since 2012, but the technology has become more widely accessible to retailers. Online retailers, such as iHerb and Oriental Trading Company, source advertisements for display on their sites using Amazon Retail Ad Service. This provides a new revenue stream from ad fees while boosting sales of related products. As personalization technology continues to advance, advertisements will become more targeted and, subsequently, more effective. These ads will also utilize low-cost hardware, such as Signage Stick, to extend beyond the home effectively.
4. Immersive Shopping Experiences
For years, various technologies, including Proto holograms, magic mirrors, Bodd 3D body scanning, and augmented reality, have been discussed as ways to integrate technology into physical stores. Such solutions aim to bring aspects of web shopping into the brick-and-mortar retail environment.
Proto’s hologram displays assist with product visualization and provide more avenues for conversion, while Bodd 3D scanning technology delivers instant apparel sizing. Immersive experiences function in reverse, bringing physical aspects of shopping online with virtual stores, 3D product images, in-store chatbots, and virtual try-on solutions.
Retailers will continue the trend of making online experiences mirror in-store shopping and, conversely, optimizing in-store experiences to match the efficiency of online shopping.
5. Modern Commerce
Despite widespread discussion, channel silos persist for many retailers. Moreover, many continue to use batch processing to move data, which can cause latency issues. Furthermore, brittle integrations stand in the way of innovation. To achieve a future-ready commerce stance, retailers must invest in four key areas:
- Omnichannel: Many retailers are running some form of omnichannel sales and marketing but need to optimize to safeguard profitability. They must effectively manage the corner cases, including returns, and ensure the experience is seamless as possible, making investments essential.
- Unified commerce: Instead of using “duct tape” to integrate in-store and online systems, a truly omnichannel solution involves unifying data, which means a single product catalog, customer database, and set of promotions. Custom user interfaces should be underpinnned by a single selling engine.
- Composable commerce: The rigidity of monolithic infrastructure and the complexity of integrations hold back innovation. Retailers need to embrace a composable approach to commerce using the latest MACH architecture.
- Personalization: Retailers should personalize experiences as much as possible based on their knowledge of each shopper. Expectations are high for relevant, compelling, and differentiated experiences.
Each retailer’s journey will be unique, based on their starting point. The goal is to have every company consider these five themes and select the technologies that matter most to their long-term strategies.
[1] The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025, Gartner
