News & Insights

JD Group CEO Regis Schultz told World Retail Congress delegates that he was prepared for the company to allow organic AI growth and to take risks to drive forwards.

“Customer adoption has been so quick, much quicker than we were expecting. Much faster than the internet,” he said. “I said [to the teams] let’s be high risk let’s go for it, so it’s about changing the mindset. Organic and let it go. The biggest risk is to do nothing.”

In the US the company as started to have its first orders through ChatGPT and two-thirds were from new customers. JD Sports is also using AI to adapt marketing by country and it is using AI to optimise product inventory.

“I think you have to be in the race to win it, so we have decided to go for it. But I think one issue is trust, because there are not commercial large language models yet, so consumers trust the results,” he pointed out.

Dairy Farm International Group CEO Scott Price said that the multi-brand Asian giant is mostly using AI for personalisation, from meal solutions to personalised discounts.

“Where it’s especially interesting for us is for team members and helping them. Thirdly, it’s around business tasks, which are being replaced a bit by AI,” he added. “We need to be a little bit patient about how this is going to develop.”

Looking to the rapid progress of AI he added: “A year ago I would never believe an average retailer could be taken out of business by AI but now I believe it will. You will be disintermediated simply on pricing.”

For Dairy Farm one of the other challenges is simply going across multiple apps, brands, countries and SKUs, which is proving highly complex.

“You also need team buy-in, with staff worried about losing their jobs. I like to say we are human-led, tech enabled,” he said.

John Lewis Partner & Managing Director Peter Ruis said that the department store group had used AI for advertising, has adopted Gemini internally, plus used it for price optimisation.

“Then we see search engines from large language models, which are at 2.5% now, a year earlier it was zero,” he said. “If you’re a senior leader and you’re not working with AI then you are behind. Everyone is going for it and we’ll then determine what we drive forward and down. You can pull back from being fast adopter, not from being asleep.”

The session was moderated by Malin Andree, Global Retail and Europe Central Consumer & Health Leader, EY.