1、August 2024Retail PracticeLLM to ROI:How to scale gen AI in retailRetailers continue to experiment with generative AI and are seeing that the technology holds great promise for reigniting growthif they move quickly to seize the opportunity.This article is a collaborative effort by Alexander Sukharev

2、sky,Andreas Ess,Denis Emelyantsev,Emily Reasor,and Holger Hrtgen,with Oleg Sokolov and Sergey Kondratyuk,representing views from QuantumBlack,AI by McKinsey,and McKinseys Retail Practice.Once generative AI(gen AI)hit the mainstream,in late 2022,it took little time for retail executives to realize th

3、e potential in front of them.Mentions of artificial intelligence(AI)in retailers earnings calls soared last yearwhich was no surprise,given that gen AI is poised to unlock between$240 billion to$390 billion in economic value for retailers,equivalent to a margin increase across the industry of 1.2 to

4、 1.9 percentage points.This,combined with the value of nongenerative AI and analytics,could turn billions of dollars in value into trillions.Over the past year,most retailers have started testing different gen AI use cases across the retail value chain.Even with all this experimentation,however,few

5、companies have managed to realize the technologys full potential at scale.We surveyed more than 50 retail executives,and although most say they are piloting and scaling large language models(LLMs)and gen AI broadly,only two executives say they have successfully implemented gen AI across their organi

6、zations(see sidebar,“Our survey findings”).Some retailers have found it difficult to implement gen AI widely because it requires rewiring parts of the retail organization,such as technical capabilities and talent.Data quality and privacy concerns,insufficient resources and expertise,and implementati