Retail business leaders are entering 2025 under mounting pressure to solve complex challenges while driving results. Data overload, siloed operations and ineffective personalization are holding them back. Despite having more data than ever, many struggle to make sense of it — let alone act on it effectively.
Deloitte data describes that retailers still face challenges in capturing and effectively using data. Another recent study shows that more than half of business leaders today find they are overwhelmed by the number of insights and data points they receive daily. This same survey found that, on average, organizations utilize only 45% of their data, meaning a sizeable portion of data remains untapped.
AI has become a critical tool for addressing these demands, offering ways to enhance efficiency and operations, but it’s not a silver bullet. Data alone isn’t enough — what retailers truly need is a way to make sense of this information, align teams around it and turn insights into action. That’s where journey management comes in. Retailers that take a journey management approach can bridge the gap between data and action, ensuring insights lead to real improvements in efficiency and customer experience and drive bottom-line results.
The Data Overload Problem
Retailers generate massive amounts of data but often fail to act on it effectively and use less than half in decision-making. Executives regularly check multiple dashboards yet struggle to prioritize key insights, leading to delays, missed opportunities and decisions made on partial or outdated insights. Additionally, a huge amount of retailer insights are qualitative or unstructured data like call transcripts and product reviews, which to date have been very time-intensive to analyze.
Advertisement
Finally, many retailers operate in a siloed manner. Disconnected teams mean fragmented decision-making. When inventory management, marketing, supply chain and in-store operations don’t speak the same language and rely on separate data streams and objectives, there’s a loss of agility. This in turn leads to stockouts, misaligned campaigns and frustrated customers.
AI can help retailers process unstructured data at scale, unlocking valuable insights. However, without a clear strategy to integrate these insights into decision-making, businesses risk drowning in even more disconnected data points.
Retailers need a structured approach that filters and prioritizes actionable data. One approach for business leaders to consider is a thoughtful journey management strategy.
What is Journey Management?
Journey management is a structured approach to decision-making that aligns teams, data and workflows around the entire customer experience rather than isolated touch points. As a structured approach to mapping and optimizing every interaction a customer has with a brand, journey management ensures that data isn’t just collected but is actively used to improve experiences. For retailers, it can prove to be the missing link between AI-driven insights and real-world action, helping them break down silos between teams and departments, prioritize key pain points and create seamless, high-impact customer journeys.
Without a clear framework for integrating AI-driven insights into decision-making, businesses risk creating even more disconnected data points. Journey management provides the framework retailers need to ensure that AI insights don’t just add to the noise of disconnected data points but help unify teams and drive strategic action.
Superficial Personalization – the Pitfalls Where Automation can Fall Flat
Retailers know personalization is critical but they often fall short of scaling it effectively. Many rely on static, backward-looking dashboards that fail to account for changing real-time consumer behavior. Another challenge is that using too much automation when personalizing a customer interaction will lead to generic or irrelevant experiences, or ‘fake personalization’ that feels inauthentic, doesn’t resonate with customers — or worse, actually has a negative impact.
Major retailers integrate real-time browsing behavior and trends to deliver hyper-relevant recommendations. However, relying solely on automation can backfire. Combining AI with leadership’s emotional intelligence ensures that personalization feels meaningful rather than robotic.
This is another example where journey management becomes essential — it provides the structure to refine AI-driven personalization, ensuring recommendations align with broader customer needs rather than just past behaviors. Without it, even the most sophisticated AI can struggle to deliver meaningful engagement
AI and Journey Management – a Winning Combination?
AI alone isn’t enough. In the face of the AI insights paradox, journey management offers an opportunity to enhance its impact by aligning departments, streamlining data and enabling proactive decisions. Together, they help retailers overcome their data “overwhelm” while also allowing them to make more data-backed decisions informed by the entire organization.
When combined with AI, journey management can more quickly help unify fragmented data into a single actionable view, enabling retailers to identify recurring issues such as product availability problems and address them to improve satisfaction. It also breaks down silos by aligning teams around shared goals, fostering collaboration across departments to resolve complex issues in real time, such as supply chain disruptions impacting both online and in-store operations. Together, AI and journey management drive predictive personalization, using real-time data to anticipate consumer behaviors and automate meaningful interactions at scale.
Some retailers are combining predictive analytics with human insight to deliver hyper-relevant experiences without losing the empathy and intuition that build loyalty. This combination also shifts decision-making from reactive to proactive, allowing retailers to anticipate trends and act on emerging opportunities rather than reacting to past performance.
We are also seeing some retailers integrate AI into their supply chain to enable real-time adjustments across stores, warehouses and online operations. By combining predictive analytics with thoughtful journey management and not overly relying on dashboards, these brands turn data into action, ensuring teams work toward shared goals and adapt quickly to challenges. As AI adoption accelerates, retailers that successfully integrate journey management will gain a competitive edge – turning data into strategic foresight rather than just operational efficiency.
Looking Ahead – a Strategic Approach for C-Suite Leaders in Retail
Retailers that embrace AI and journey management in 2025 will move from reactive to proactive decision-making, from data overwhelm to actionable intelligence, and from generic automation to predictive personalization. This year isn’t just about keeping up – it’s about setting new standards in efficiency, agility, and customer experience.
Jochem van der Veer is the Co-founder and CEO of TheyDo. A designer by trade, he has nearly a decade’s experience in UX consultancy. He founded TheyDo in 2019 to help businesses truly become customer-centric by organizing around the customer journey.
