Retailers harness AI and first-party data to redefine personalised shopping experiences

Leading brands like CVS, Ulta Beauty, and Whatnot are leveraging AI and first-party data to create seamless, personalised retail environments that strengthen customer relationships and adapt to the evolving digital landscape.

Across the retail landscape, a transformative convergence of physical and digital channels is reshaping how brands connect with consumers. This shift, driven largely by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and strategic use of first-party data, is enabling retailers to create seamless, unified environments that elevate customer confidence, loyalty, and relevance. Leading this charge are companies like CVS, Whatnot, Ulta Beauty, Furniture.com, and Newtimes Group, each applying AI and data in innovative ways to collapse operational friction and foster more meaningful, personalised relationships with shoppers.

At the heart of this transformation is the recognition that modern retail is less about isolated transactions and more about crafting an ongoing, responsive relationship with customers. For instance, CVS leverages its massive database of 90 million addressable consumers across sectors like beauty, health, and wellness to fuel its retail media network. This network integrates diverse touchpoints, from in-store screens to mobile apps and emails, allowing CVS to deliver finely targeted marketing and elevate the in-store experience. The company’s ‘tempo strategy’ aligns merchandising, marketing, and retail media efforts to orchestrate cohesive campaigns that effectively drive sales and deepen consumer engagement.

Similarly, Whatnot exemplifies how live commerce and community building intertwine with AI. The platform’s CEO, Armand Wilson, highlights AI’s role as an “efficiency layer” that supports human sellers by automating tasks such as instant auction creation and trust checks, without diluting the personal element that fuels buyer connections. This commitment to community authenticity has facilitated Whatnot’s rapid growth, backed by a recent $265 million Series E funding round that raised its valuation to nearly $5 billion. The capital aims to further expand its live shopping platform, develop seller tools, and enhance trust and safety, crucial areas for sustaining user trust in a digitally native environment.

In the beauty sector, Ulta Beauty integrates AI-powered solutions like virtual beauty advisors and large language models to offer personalised, conversational support and anticipate customers’ needs through recommendation engines. Despite significant digital innovation, Ulta maintains that physical stores remain paramount. Their digital tools are designed to complement and enrich the in-store experience, creating a fluid connection between online inspiration and physical product engagement.

Furniture.com, positioned at the intersection of technology and home goods retail, uses AI to harmonise data from around 70 retailers into a structured catalogue. This enables a much more intuitive shopping process, such as prompt-based searches for furnishings tailored to specific household needs. However, despite its tech-forward approach, the majority of major furniture purchases still initiate in-store, underscoring the persistent importance of bricks-and-mortar presence. Furniture.com’s strategy involves sending pre-qualified customers who discover products online to physical locations, enhancing consumer confidence and driving qualified traffic to partners rather than displacing them.

Newtimes Group’s approach to retail media and data similarly dovetails with a reverence for heritage and storytelling. By reopening a flagship store for the Robert Talbott brand on Madison Avenue, the group emphasises the flagship as a brand laboratory and narrative hub that supports broader wholesale and direct-to-consumer channels. Its data-driven inventory decisions leverage real-time sales insights from this location and global manufacturing touchpoints, underscoring the sophisticated balance of tradition and modernity.

Across all these case studies, the deployment of AI is consistently described not as flamboyant technology but as foundational infrastructure, “plumbing” rather than “pyrotechnics.” AI quietly automates routine and complex processes, reducing friction in tasks like inventory management, trust verification, search functionality, and personalised communication. This allows sellers, associates, and consumers to engage more deeply in authentic interactions.

Moreover, first-party data serves as the crucial connective tissue enabling these experiences. Deep behavioural and purchase insights allow retailers to tailor offerings with precision, whether through CVS’s granular shopper segmentation, Ulta’s loyalty member signals, or Whatnot’s community behaviour tracking. Importantly, this data-driven approach prioritises customer understanding and fairness, aiming to make every interaction feel personalised and coherent rather than disjointed and transactional.

These insights carry broader implications for financial institutions, payment networks, and fintech companies as commerce evolves into a blend of streams, stories, and services rather than mere product exchanges. The future battleground lies in the orchestration of these complex, media-rich commerce ecosystems, where trusted payment rails must ensure safety, seamlessness, and measurability.

Ultimately, the next generation of retail success hinges on quietly integrating AI and data analytics to enhance the human aspects of shopping, building trust, fostering community, and delivering unified experiences. As Whatnot succinctly puts it, the mission is to restore “the personal element to the shopping experience that has been missing as eCommerce has just taken off.” This human-centred ethos defines the new retail paradigm, one as much about relationship-building as it is about sales.

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Source: Fuse Wire