The emerald advantage: how technology is shaping the future of Irish retail

Summary: We look at a challenging retail landscape in Ireland and explore how technology can help grocery retailers build trust, stronger promotions, and process optimisations to secure a healthy and resilient future

In the fluid Irish grocery market, retailers that make sound product merchandising choices have real potential to grow and win share. Kantar figures suggest take-home grocery sales in Ireland grew 6.5% year-on-year in early 2025. But as household grocery bills have risen almost 27% since 2021^[1], and as shoppers’ average basket size has shrunk, success is far from a given.

Winning share from unsettled customers means out-thinking, not out-spending, deep discounters and competition from cross-border sales. A focus on supplier collaboration, sharper promotions and lean, data-driven pricing is vital, because heavy markdowns cannot do all the work. Success now hinges on investing in technology that ensures every promotional euro works harder.

Embracing the power of AI pricing

The transition to a smarter retail merchandising model likely begins by using retail AI to optimise pricing. There is nothing more important in such a competitive landscape: price optimisation directly affects revenue, is the core of profitability, and influences customer perception like nothing else. Research from McKinsey^[2] suggests that a 1% increase in price can lead to an 8% increase in profit.

With a typical retail assortment of 10,000 items, protecting margins while remaining fair is a monumental task for humans to tackle, but one which retail price optimisation software can help simplify. A high volume of data is difficult for humans to manage but fuels the abilities of smart retailing tools.

The more such software knows about a business, the market at large, supplier offerings and so on, the more it can simplify the task of driving strategic change that maximises a customer’s willingness to pay and their likelihood to return.

Strengthening promotions with intelligent merchandising tools

Pricing is not the only way to keep customers coming back. Intelligent merchandising software offers a host of ways to boost retail business. It works within firm boundaries, safely turning data into insights which build customer and retailer confidence. AI in retail can be applied in numerous ways, including:

• Supporting promotion management, revealing optimum product placement to identify the lines which will give the best ROI
• Blending historic and real-time purchasing data for optimal forecasting, to determine how a product should perform based on previous marketing and promotional data
• Aiding in virtually calculating profit and loss (P&L), with the ability to consider past, present and future activity
• Helping build a confident go-to-market plan before any promotion, product merchandising or marketing activity goes live.

Fostering two-way relationships with suppliers

While consumer preferences lie at one end, supplier needs sit at the other. It’s interesting to note that many trade promotions established between retailer and supplier are not profitable, often due to outdated and siloed methods of working.

Replace the spreadsheets, emails and phone calls with AI-based software, and retailers are able to collaborate consistently and transparently with suppliers. Everyone benefits from the ability to react to shifting sales patterns, gain insight into promotion planning and understand the supply chain dynamics involved.

Retail Express’s dedicated real-time supplier collaboration portal means that trading partners can better work together to tighten merchandising agreements and ensure sales growth with clear visibility of promotional ROI – working with a single up-to-date version of the truth. This is true two-way communication, two-party authorship of promotions and consent, and joined-up business planning.

Create a smarter, future-ready business

Irish households are scrutinising every euro. The grocery battleground of 2026 will only become more complex. But far from making retail activities more complicated, a move to AI-driven back-end tools is the route to cutting through the noise. With a fresh focus, retailers can then present value clearly, honour supplier partnerships, and fine-tune pricing – and customer loyalty will follow.

[1] https://www.ccpc.ie/business/research/market_research/updated-high-level-analysis-of-the-irish-grocery-retail-sector-august-2025

[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/using-big-data-to-make-better-pricing-decisions