How leaders turn pilots into scalable GenAI advantage
Retail and consumer products leaders are piloting generative AI across marketing, e-commerce, R&D, and customer service, but most remain stuck in early adoption with limited measurable impact. Deloitte’s 2025 survey shows rising budgets, strict ROI thresholds, and a growing reliance on third parties—yet the biggest barrier is fluency, not funding. The winners will pair executive “captains,” disciplined use case selection, and robust governance to scale securely and capture near-term value.
Points clés
- The Deloitte AI Institute connects academia, startups, and industry to advance applied AI, ethics, and human-machine collaboration, guiding organizations to make informed, competitive AI decisions.
- Most organizations are early in GenAI adoption: 85% of consumer products and 76% of retail are in exploration, with only 25% of retail and 15% of consumer products identifying as GenAI leaders.
- Adoption clusters in creative and contextual functions: in retail, 65% report some GenAI use in e-commerce (17% widespread) and 59% in marketing and branding.
- In consumer products, 70% report GenAI adoption in marketing and branding (9% widely deployed), with over 50% using it in customer service and R&D.
- Investment is accelerating: 97% plan to maintain or increase GenAI spend next year; nearly 50% expect a 10%+ budget rise, while 11% plan 20%+.
- Financial rigor is rising: 73% treat GenAI like other enterprise tech investments; ROI is the top metric with an average ~3x threshold and a one-year average payback period.
- Decision-making is distributed: 54% cite IT leaders as primary decision-makers, 49% operations leaders, 43% the CEO, and only 7% procurement/vendor management.
- Most organizations rely on partners: over half lean on third parties across GenAI functions, with cloud and data platform enablement most outsourced (64% retail, 67% consumer products).
- The leading risk is lack of understanding, followed by unclear roles/responsibilities and fear of job displacement; notably, cost is not seen as a primary barrier.
- Deloitte outlines four capability pillars—strategy, intake, delivery, and control—and flags a scaling gap, with 90% struggling to reach production and over 65% of applications outsourced.
À retenir
Start where the value is obvious—think e-commerce personalization, smarter marketing, and faster customer service—and measure everything like your CFO is watching (because they are). Appoint a clear executive “captain,” define who does what, and get your teams GenAI-fluent before the pilots multiply like rabbits. And yes, bring in expert partners for speed, but build your own muscles too; you don’t want your AI strategy to be “rent-a-brain” forever—unless your plan is to outsource your competitive edge, too.
Sources
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