SAP has announced its new AI-enhanced retail operating system ahead of the NRF 2026 event next week.
Launching later this year, the Retail Intelligence solution is designed to drive better customer experiences by integrating core retail systems for operational and customer engagement purposes.
This solution is designed to deliver reliability and consistency across the customer journey, enabling a seamless, omnichannel experience.
Speaking with CX Today, Jessica Keehn, CMO of SAP CX, highlighted that the solution helps retailers manage operations end-to-end with improved consistency, lower manual effort, and stronger analytical and automation capabilities.
"[This] allows our retail customers to run their operations end-to-end so much more effectively, consistently, and with so much less man power than is needed today.
"Its all done through high quality data layered with AI and insights that you can't do unless you have that consolidated into one place."
The Retail Intelligence solution will be launched directly into SAP Business Data Cloud, enhancing its current capabilities by transforming data into actionable intelligence, unifying real-time data from both internal and third-party sources.
These sources include sales, inventory, customers, and suppliers, ensuring accuracy and issue prevention when the relevant data is aligned.
From here, the solution simulates the data, modelling the likelihood of how that data will behave under different conditions.
This solution shifts CX teams from reactive to proactive, by testing customer risks before impact, this assures product reliability and consistency across channels, improving customer trust.
Furthermore, this solution also aims to enhance SAP’s retail and fashion suite, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, a foundational platform that manages retail and fashion operations with greater intelligence and speed.
As part of its new generation of innovations, SAP will also launch its natural language capability, Natural Language Assortment Management, into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, utilizing the AI assistant, Joule, for manual intervention in creating, modifying, or retiring assortments using natural language.
This makes the system more accessible to users and positively affects the market it’s trying to dominate, achieving speedier responses to market shifts and allowing for real-time adjustments to trend changes.
Other capabilities also include enhancing SAP’s omnichannel abilities by designing a single, closed-loop operating system unifying data and AI to ensure seamless advancements.
As a closed-loop retail model, this AI-native solution is designed to facilitate faster decision-making, stronger fulfillment reliability, and consistent omnichannel experiences for both retailers and direct-to-consumer businesses.
By functioning as an agentic orchestration, this reduces fragmentation for retailers by operating data and AI agents together across an enterprise and avoiding disconnection.
This solution will also enhance service team communication and enable customers to access support across multiple environments, while maintaining a frictionless experience.
