A loyal customer, who has been buying from the brand's e-commerce for years, walks into a physical store. The salesperson greets them warmly, but without access to their history. Without context, they offer products that have little relation to their profile. The customer gets frustrated, leaves without buying, and the sale is lost. The problem is not the customer, it's the system.
While consumers live in an integrated way, retail still behaves as if it serves different people: one on the website, another on the app, another in the physical store. Behind the modern discourse, the reality is still fragmented, and this disconnection is costly, resulting in compressed margins, inconsistent experiences, and missed sales opportunities.
According to ABComm, Brazilian e-commerce generated R$204.3 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach R$234.9 billion in 2025. The expansion is undeniable, even with channels still disconnected. Imagine the growth potential if all these touchpoints genuinely communicated with each other. Full integration between physical and digital wouldn't just be a trend: it would be a revolution in terms of margin, efficiency, and revenue.
When the system fails to connect all points of the customer journey, the impact on results is immediate. In a fragmented model, the customer researches on the website, finds a price, but sees a different one in the store. The product that seemed available is out of stock, and the salesperson doesn't know that the customer has already tried to buy it through the app. The experience breaks down, and the sale is almost always lost. Now, imagine this scenario in a genuinely integrated operation: the customer is recognized on any channel, the price is consistent, inventory updates in real-time, and customer service already starts with the complete history readily available. What used to be friction turns into fluidity. What once led to abandonment now turns into conversion.
Studies by McKinsey and Deloitte show that companies offering truly integrated experiences can increase customer retention by about 20% and profitability by up to 30%, compared to those still operating in a fragmented way. In a context of increasingly narrow margins, this difference can represent millions of Brazilian reals in EBITDA in a given fiscal year.
The problem is that a large part of the market has built what I call “facade omnichannel.” Retailers invest in multiple channels but forget to connect them. Legacy systems, decentralized databases, and teams that still work in isolation prevent brands from seeing the customer as a whole. The result is a feeling of modernity without real value delivery.
The turning point happens when the business starts operating with a single brain, capable of gathering, interpreting, and acting on real-time data, supported by a single source of truth (“single source of truth“). It is this unified base, strategically allocated in the architecture to quickly feed any sales channel, that allows for rapid, personalized, and consistent decisions, instead of fragmented perceptions.
It is from this data—centralized, secure, and organized—that Artificial Intelligence will leverage itself to redefine buying experiences and interactions with brands.
A VTEX analysis of its Latin American customer base demonstrated, in practice, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on retail performance and efficiency. For example, in electronics retailers, context-driven search systems with AI — that is, mechanisms that understand the meaning and intent behind a query to deliver more relevant results, even when the exact product name isn't used — increased conversion rates by up to 17% and reduced search queries with no results by over 50%.
In the fashion and sports sector, automated assistants resolved 87% of customer inquiries without human intervention, reducing operational costs by 20% and, in some cases, achieving up to 94% customer satisfaction. And among beauty and wellness brands, intelligent product recommendations—systems that analyze customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history to suggest exactly what makes sense for them at that moment— increased revenue by 6% and the number of items purchased per customer by almost 10%.
In addition, AI-powered advertising solutions have become a new revenue generation front for retail: they deliver more precise ads, convert better at the point of sale, and also return valuable data to the industry, strengthening the entire ecosystem. These figures show how AI has ceased to be an innovation investment and has become a direct lever for growth, margin, and efficiency for retail.
But this transformation doesn't happen merely by adopting new tools; it demands a change in mindset. To be truly omnichannel is not about being everywhere, but about being the same everywhere. It's about integrating data, teams, and processes around a single vision, enabling agile and personalized decisions in real-time.
Personalization creates connection, and connection drives conversion. Until now, personalization and scalability were antagonistic strategies. With centralized data, in the right place and capable of generating real-time information, and with the support of AI, personalization becomes scalable within retail. The era of the trade-off between good service, understanding each customer as unique, and efficiency has come to an end.
The retail of the future will not be defined by the channels it occupies, but by the value and consistency it delivers across all of them. There is only one customer. Your retail business also needs to be one.
