As we understand, this latest Gartner® report explores the strategic leadership role that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) must adopt, the unified retail commerce (URC) strategy they should pursue, and the 2025 key trends to leverage for adapting to shifting consumer and store associate expectations, emerging technologies and market dynamics.
The pace of digital change is shaping the future of retail and how businesses achieve competitive advantage. We understand that this Gartner report emphasises the evolving role of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in leading innovative business strategies through cross-functional collaboration. We believe the report also highlights the importance of CIOs achieving seamless unified retail commerce (URC) execution, underpinned by accurate, timely and secure data and insights. From our perspective, we see how the influence and impact of people underpin Gartner’s nine key trends for 2025.
This report explores:
- The evolving role of Chief Information Officers (CIOs), from controllers of IT-driven costs to strategic leaders helping to drive business growth and profitability.
- How quickly competitive differentiation of GenAI tools is happening.
- How retailers should leverage data analytics, AI, cloud platforms, machine customers and superapps to transform customer and associate experiences and drive excellent execution of unified retail commerce (URC) business outcomes.
- The need for channel-less customer experiences based on collaborative sharing of high-quality data, which will build competitive advantage and long-term business viability.
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“The role of the retail CIO is undergoing a significant transformation from controllers of IT-driven costs to strategic leaders capable of collaborating with their business counterparts to drive business growth and profitability.”
Source: Gartner, Top Retail Trends for CIOs in 2025, 6 February 2025, Hanna Karki, Robert Hetu, Sandeep Unni, Mim Burt, Tom Nolan, Max Panther Hammond, Kelsie Marian, Jonathan Kutner, Ellen Eichhorn, Michelle DeClue
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