Strategy · AI Design · IBM
Store of the Future
Strategy · Agentic AI Design · IBM × Major UK Retailer
Timeline
~6 weeks · NRF 2026
Role
Team
IBM Design, Strategy & Build teams · Retail industry experts
Tools
watsonx Orchestrate · IBM Event Automation · Figma · Mural · Adobe AE
01The Brief
How might we...
How might we give a store manager a real-time, agentic view of their whole store — turning a flood of live events into the few insights and actions that actually matter?
02Context
A store manager, drowning in disconnected systems
A Major UK Retailer wanted to reimagine how a store runs. Today a store manager juggles revenue, stock, checkouts, staffing and compliance across disconnected systems, reacting to problems hours after they happen. The brief was a 'store of the future': ingest live store events, process them in real time, and add an agentic AI layer that hands the manager the insights and actions that matter most — so they run the store instead of chasing data.
03Insights Discovered
Five blind spots between the shop floor and the manager
Five problems kept surfacing, all symptoms of the same gap between the shop floor and what the manager can see. Sales dashboards react too slowly to sudden demand spikes. Shelves get refilled late, causing out-of-stocks and missed sales. Stock shown as 'in stock' is often already gone, forcing costly discounts. Checkout queues build with no live metrics to act on. And manual compliance reporting eats time and invites error.
04Process
A Christmas-break build, demoed at NRF
We built a solution that ingests live store events, processes them in real time with IBM Event Automation, and uses watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic layer on top. It was a complex build on a tight turnaround — starting just before the Christmas break — shaped through weekly co-design with retail industry experts.
Co-design with industry experts
Weekly sessions with IBM and retail experts grounded the work in the store-manager persona and tested every workflow against how a real store runs.
A scalable design system, built solo
I single-handedly created the design system in Figma. A global and text colour palette with semantic roles, a typographic scale and reusable components — graph tiles, insight cards, tags and sliders — all built on shared tokens and styles for a clean, minimal aesthetic. Structuring it this way meant every screen, and every new view we added under the NRF deadline, was assembled from one consistent, scalable source of truth.
Real-time events, agentic layer
Live events flow through IBM Event Automation, and watsonx Orchestrate sits on top as an agentic layer that turns raw events into ranked insights and the specific action to take.
Demoed at NRF, New York
I presented the solution for the team at NRF, demoing it to around 50 retailers across the week and turning a complex agentic architecture into a clear, human story.
05Solution
An agentic operating layer for the whole store
An agentic store operating platform. Live events — sales, stock, checkouts, compliance — are processed in real time through IBM Event Automation, and watsonx Orchestrate turns that stream into prioritised insights and recommended actions. The manager opens one screen and sees exactly what needs attention, and what to do about it.
Real-time manager dashboard
Revenue, top categories, refills and checkout health at a glance, over a live activity feed — the store's vital signs, updating as events happen rather than at the end of the day.
Agentic insights & actions
watsonx Orchestrate ranks what matters — 'low stock, revenue at risk' — and pairs each insight with a one-tap action: ask the AI for context, or assign the job to a colleague.
Ask AI, a store co-pilot
The manager asks a plain-English question and gets an answer grounded in live store data, plus the next step to take — no dashboard-digging required.
Live checkout intelligence
Queue length, wait time, open checkouts and per-till health, updated live — so a manager opens a till before the queue costs a sale.
06Outcome
From a Christmas-break build to the best thing at the show
Built through weekly co-design over the NRF push, the solution was demoed more than 50 times at the IBM booth in New York and shown to senior UK retail leaders. The feedback was standout — “the best thing we've seen at the entire show” — and it opened £60k+ of new opportunities with other major UK retailers. Not bad for a build that started just before Christmas.
50+
client demos at the IBM booth at NRF, New York
£60k+
in new opportunities explored with other major UK retailers
