Retail enterprises reached a critical inflection point in their AI journeys this past year, according to Nvidia. The chip company, which has seen its profile grow exponentially with the AI boom.

The firm’s State of AI in Retail and Consumer Package Goods: 2026 Trends report shows an evolving and advancing landscape in retail as the sector takes AI investment and deployment into the next stage. The increasing importance of agentic AI, strategic implementation, intermixing with challenges in talent and data, show a transformative era in how AI is prioritised in retail.

Nvidia’s third report gives evidence to a trend throughout AI deployment: an expansion from isolated solutions to enterprise-wide strategies.

When it comes to AI maturation, Nvidia found steady improvement, with 58% of organisations saying they are actively deploying AI solutions, up from 42% in 2024.

A third (33%) are currently assessing AI solutions, which indicates a level of stabilisation from last year’s 47% – organisations appear to be advancing from the pilot stage of their AI deployments.

Despite growing investor concerns on ROI, 95% of organisations said that AI is helping to decrease annual costs, with 89% saying that the novel tech is helping to increase their annual revenue. AI deployments seem therefore to be improving the bottom line, with Nvidia finding measurable impact in operational efficiency, employee productivity, and customer experience.

Nvidia also found that 90% of organisations indicate that AI investment would grow in 2026, with 58% of executives saying that this investment would grow by more than 10%.

The tangible business impact Nvidia cited in its report is clearly invigorating appetite for AI investment for those already seeing a financial return.

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As far as what AI deployments may be prioritised, 79% said integrating open source models and tools into their stack is moderately to extremely important.

Further, nearly half (47%) said that their organisations are using or assessing AI agents, with a fifth (20%) saying AI agents are already actively deployed in their organisations.

Organisations are also turning to AI to streamline their supply chain, with 91% saying that AI is helping to decrease annual supply chain costs. Half (51%) said they’re using AI to address operational throughput and efficiency in the supply chain.