The “End of Good Enough”

The retail industry is at a critical point and those companies that don’t recognize it as we end 2025 are already falling behind. “Good enough” data is no longer sufficient for survival. Good enough is a recipe for failure.

According to recent IHL research, 70% of retailers experience inventory accuracy problems weekly or monthly, and the execution gap between leaders and laggards is turning into a gap that looks more like a canyon than a puddle. Walk into any retail store regardless of segment (grocery, drug, mass merchant, department) and you’re looking at both operational successes and a level of failure so normalized we barely notice it anymore. And it’s driving more consumers online. Empty shelf spots. Products in wrong locations. Price tags that don’t match what’s actually stocked. We’ve become conditioned to accept inventory chaos as the cost of doing business. That acceptance is killing retail profitability. Worldwide, this amounts to $1.73 trillion in lost sales.

To be fair, our industry looks simple from the outside and is beyond incredibly complex in reality. Horizontal tech players learn this real quick when they try to sell into retail and the doors slam in their face.

But there’s a fundamental split emerging that is as clear as day: a “magical 22%” of retailers have figured out the secret sauce, while everyone else is watching the window to modernize is closing at an accelerating rate.

The Four Signals of Definitive Shift

Four key signals tell us we’re witnessing a definitive shift away from fragmented legacy systems toward unified cloud platforms: 

First, there’s an aggressive pursuit of operational agility across the industry. Retailers are finally realizing that the old “patch and pray” approach to technology doesn’t work in an era where consumer expectations change faster than quarterly planning cycles. 

Second, there’s been a collective “aha” moment about AI: it’s completely useless if your data is a mess. Bad data just gets you faster bad results. The retailers experiencing the highest sales growth rate prioritize data cleaning, training, and storing at rates 110% higher than sales laggards. 

Third, winners are laser-focused on fixing the massive trillion-dollar inventory distortion problem. 2025 Profit Winners prioritize inventory visibility 208% higher than profit laggards. This is not just a difference in emphasis; it’s a divergence in strategic thinking. 

Finally, and most importantly, the execution gap between leaders and everyone else is widening rapidly. For every dollar a mid-market retailer spends on technology, Tier 1 competitors are spending two.

Let’s look deeper at this week’s installs.

Building the Data Foundation: Lowe’s Case Study

Lowe’s finance teams were spending more time hunting down data across countless different systems than actually analyzing it. It was a total mess of dispersed data and hundreds of integration points. Lowe’s new data platform using Oracle Fusion now processes over 100 million records every single day. And Lowe’s is definitely not alone. IHL’s data shows that a whopping 71% of retailers cite integration complexity as their number one barrier to transformation. By centralizing their data, Lowe’s can now go after that inventory distortion problem with tools that actually work. Time after time it is evident. Retailers who fail to unify their data foundation see 155% higher rates of execution failure compared to leaders in their segments.

The AI Acceleration: Newell Brands Goes Full Throttle

Once you get that clean foundation in place, that’s when the real fun starts. You can finally let loose with powerful tools like AI. This is where you go from just having data to actually using it to change the entire game. Check out Newell Brands. In just nine months they went from just dabbling in AI to having over 100 fully implemented use cases up and running. The results of going all-in? A 500% increase in their digital marketing assets. More content, more customer touchpoints, and they did it all with fewer people. That’s the kind of insane productivity that just changes the math for a business.  Here are specifics cited: Customer service response times dropped from 3 hours down to just 15 minutes. Overall productivity shot up by 300-400%. And they’re getting deeper consumer insights than they’ve ever had before.

Now, Newell’s full throttle strategy was not the only path. Procter & Gamble has built an “AI Factory,” a more methodical, platform-based approach to scale AI that they claim cuts deployment time by 6 months. Two very different paths, but both get you to the same place: scaling AI effectively.

The Widening Execution Gap

This is where the story gets really tough for a huge part of the industry. We are seeing a tale of two different retail markets emerging. Mid-market retailers, those with revenues between $10M and $2B, are expecting to grow, but they’re stuck in an incredibly dangerous spot. They’re being massively outspent on technology by the giants.  In fact, in our latest research study (How Retail Leaders Outperform) we see for every single dollar a mid-market retailer spends on technology, their Tier 1 competitors are spending two, a 2:1 spending advantage. And that’s what’s fueling the execution advantage we keep talking about. The statistics get even more sobering when it comes to IT capabilities: Only 25% of mid-market retailers possess strong in-house technical capabilities, making them reliant on vendors who often don’t understand their specific operational complexities. With 71% citing ROI uncertainty as their top concern, many are paralyzed while the execution gap widens. Sadly, the window to catch up is closing. And it’s closing fast.

The Question Every Retail Executive Must Answer in 2026

When you pull all of these stories together from Lowe’s massive data project to the smart focused plays from smaller retailers like Sea Bags (who slashed annual platform costs by 20% through unified commerce with Shopify), you arrive at the most important point: Is your technology closing the gap, or are you falling further behind? 

And the data reveals where smart retailers are placing their bets. Inventory visibility ranks as the #2 technology priority for 39% of retailers surveyed, behind only personalizing customer experience. 2025 Profit Winners prioritize inventory visibility 208% higher than profit laggards. 

And that accuracy, fueling AI systems is making all the difference as we turn the corner to 2026.

The era of “good enough” is over. The only question is: what are you going to do about it?

For more case studies see here or jump into the full research, visit ihlservices.com and download the “Closing the Execution Gap” report and others for free. Looking for this kind of data to help your sales efforts or to benchmark against your competitors, try JustAskGreg.ai