Hive Barometer on AI winners and losers: Why size, spend and confidence don’t add up the way you’d think

Ask any retailer if AI matters and you’ll get the same answer. Ask if they’re ready for it, and the answers stop lining up.

The Retail Hive’s new Barometer surveyed 700+ active retailers to find out where AI readiness really sits, and the results overturn most of the obvious assumptions. It isn’t the smallest operators feeling most exposed, and it isn’t the biggest and most complex either. Confidence dips hardest in the messy middle, in the retailers big enough to have accumulated real complexity but not yet big enough to fund their way out of it. Bigger tech budgets don’t buy confidence. And the operating model usually held up as the gold standard turns out to be the least confident of the lot.

Produced with Shopify, the report breaks down exactly where the gap between AI ambition and AI capability opens up, and what’s actually separating the retailers pulling ahead from the ones falling behind.