In 2026, competitive advantage is shifting from invention to absorption. The winners will be the companies that can continuously select proven solutions, integrate them with minimal friction, and scale what works across countries—without overwhelming the organization.
Retail doesn't have an innovation problem. It has an absorption problem.
At NRF 2026, the imbalance showed up in full. The market is flooded with vendors, tools, and AI "solutions" - far more than any enterprise can realistically evaluate, integrate, and scale. The result is what leaders increasingly experience as enterprise indigestion: too many options, too little capacity to turn them into working standards.
IT determines absorption speed
In large retail groups, IT plays a dual role: it is both the most constrained resource and the function that ultimately determines what the organization can safely absorb.
That role is rational. IT is responsible for uptime, security, data integrity, and architectural coherence across a complex landscape of systems. But the practical implication is clear: every new tool competes for scarce attention—security reviews, architecture alignment, integration work, and long-term maintenance.
This is why, in enterprise retail, integration and maintenance are the real price. A low license fee is a false economy if the solution requires heavy integration, increases long-term maintenance load, or triggers repeated, complex governance cycles.
Integration and maintenance are the real price. A low license fee is a false economy if it triggers repeated, complex governance cycles.
"Build vs. Buy" has become "Adopt vs. Stall"
For years, many enterprise retailers treated building in-house as a sign of strength. Today, in fast-moving software and AI cycles, it often becomes a liability.
When the market already offers mature solutions, rebuilding them internally rarely creates differentiation. At best, it creates delay—if the internal build even reaches parity. More often, companies end up with a “Trabant instead of a Mercedes”—and sometimes the Trabant costs more than the Mercedes once you include time, staffing, opportunity cost, and technical debt.
The pragmatic rule is simple: Build only what truly differentiates your customer experience. For everything else, adopt what already works—and scale it.
Why pilots stall: they repeat what's already been proven
Most retail groups don't struggle because pilots don't work. They struggle because pilots get repeated country by country—burning time and IT capacity to re-prove what has already been proven elsewhere.
In Europe, this pattern is especially common simply because there are many markets and operating variations. The issue is not that local pilots are "wrong". The issue is that running separate pilots in every country becomes an adoption tax—each market repeats the same learning curve, the same security reviews, and the same integration logic.
The real challenge isn't proof. It's rollout design and ownership at the right level. If you want scale, the pilot must be structured from day one as a bridge to group standardization, not as a standalone local experiment.
That's why pilot discipline needs to change:
- Pilot to compare, not to prove: Use pilots to test multiple options side by side, with clear, standardized success criteria.
- Pilot with scaling in mind: The pilot is not the goal. The goal is a repeatable standard that can be rolled out across markets.
Build a group-level adoption engine
To make this work consistently, retail groups need a permanent capability - an Adoption Engine - with a clear mandate to scan the market for mature solutions, select with integration burden as a primary criterion, and scale what works through a repeatable playbook.
This isn't a one-off transformation team. It’s an ongoing function - because the market will not stop changing, and the organization needs a consistent way to absorb change without overloading IT.
The operating rule of this engine is: Scale learning, not pilots.
Scale learning, not pilots.
A practical operating model looks like this:
- Don't re-pilot—roll out: If a solution works in one market, capture the playbook and standardize the approach.
- Make learning portable: Ensure every subsequent market benefits from the first implementation's security reviews and integration logic.
- Compound the advantage: Improvement spreads faster when knowledge travels.
The Hourglass Model (Innovation Funnel vs. Absorption Funnel)
The pragmatic checklist for retail leaders
- Pilot to compare, not to prove. Run pilots as controlled comparisons of market options—not validation for a single vendor.
- Make integration effort and maintenance load top selection criteria. If it’s heavy to integrate or costly to maintain, it’s expensive—no matter the price on the contract.
- Design for group ownership early. Secure parent-level buy-in from the start to avoid local silos that IT cannot support later.
- Scale learning, not experiments. If it works in one country, roll it out to the next. Don’t force each market through the same learning curve.
- Dedicate IT to orchestrating modular solutions - not reinventing them. Treat IT as a deployment function: integrate, govern, and run standards. Aim for Modular Agility through Composable Architecture—clean APIs and interfaces so modules can be swapped in weeks, not quarters.
- Build only what truly separates you from the pack. Use internal development where it creates differentiation—not where the market already has mature answers.
Closing: the cure for enterprise indigestion
The fastest retailers won't be the ones with the most pilots. They'll be the ones with the best adoption engine—able to select proven solutions, minimize integration and maintenance load, and scale through group standards without overwhelming IT.
If enterprise indigestion is the diagnosis, the cure is straightforward: Adopt proven solutions, minimize integration load, and scale through group standards - supported by a permanent adoption engine.