In an era defined by relentless macroeconomic shifts, evolving customer expectations, and intense competition, the ability to decode market signals, spot opportunities before they manifest, and act decisively is the ultimate competitive advantage. This requires a new level of organizational perceptiveness: the ability to understand the deeper context from data.
Perceptive retail is a paradigm shift in how retailers do business. It harnesses the interplay of three factors: reasoning-based decision intelligence, nuanced insights from multimodal data, and the autonomy of machine agents to generate intelligent choices for smarter decisions and better business outcomes.
Perceptive retail is reimagining every aspect of business. We’ve seen a marked shift to a world where technology is an integral factor within the workforce from one where technology supports human efforts. Going forward, gaining a competitive edge will require a strong focus on four key pillars - unified CX, agentic operations, growth ecosystems, and circular retail.
The retail industry is stepping into a new era - one defined by intelligence, adaptability, and purpose. Now more than ever, retailers are focused on achieving their mission-critical objectives, pursuing smarter optimization strategies, and seeking new ways to build customer loyalty, agility, and resilience. The TCS Global Retail Outlook report, shows where the industry is heading in 2026 and beyond.
For the majority of retailers we surveyed, cloud has played an essential role in virtually every significant industry shift over the past few years. The TCS Global Cloud Study reveals that while retailers recognize the role cloud-enabled innovation can play in enabling new ways of connecting data, people, and knowledge and are already invested in cloud, they have more work to do.
Mark Higgins
CFO, AO World
TCS have obviously been a really important partner to help us deliver the finance part of Dynamics 365, but we’ve firmly got a belief that we should transform all of our mid office operations onto 365 over time. We see the capabilities and skills of TCS being key to supporting us through that transformation. You know, we simply couldn't do it without them,”
John Bates
Technology Director, Morrisons
TCS continues to be a critical part of my team. And as we plan for the future and over the next couple of years, I can see us continuing to improve, innovate, and deliver great benefits for our business,”
Jo Hartley
Chief Financial Officer, Halfords
The key developments that have strengthened our business are really being able to partner with TCS and Microsoft together. That's helped to strengthen the business case and reduce capital expenditure. In addition, being able to align and optimize usage has enabled us to reduce operating costs far beyond those that you normally see in traditional hosting solutions,”