How retailers, restaurants and automakers deploy AI

Findings

What the retail and consumer profiles show

1. Lowe's is the only company in the sector with a business return it credits to AI since May 2025: Lowe's credits AI coding and code review tools with double-digit productivity gains for its engineers (Nov 2025 to May 2026). Lowe's publishes no firm-level AI figure and does not say how much of its roughly $1 billion a year productivity program comes from AI, and no company in the sector is at Scaling or Embedded.

2. Retailers' customer-facing AI assistants report conversion and service measures rather than dollars: Lowe's reports a tripled conversion rate among online customers who use Mylow (May and Aug 2026) and a customer satisfaction gain of about 200 basis points when associates use Mylow Companion (Nov 2025 to May 2026), The Home Depot's Ted Decker wrote in Mar 2026 that Magic Apron is translating into higher conversion and sales without giving a figure, and Best Buy tied a 17% decline in customer contacts in Q3 of fiscal 2026 to AI and more self-serve options (Nov 2025) with no cost or headcount figure.

3. Several companies in the sector run AI inside their stores, restaurants and plants as well as in the cloud: McDonald's ArchIQ runs on Google edge servers in its restaurants (Sep 2026), Lowe's runs AI on Dell servers with NVIDIA GPUs in micro data centers in its stores (Oct 2025), and Ford Motor Company's Mobile AI Vision System ran at more than 1,000 workstations in 17 North American plants by Jun 2026, where it had performed 150 million inspections that flagged 400,000 quality issues. Starbucks store teams use Green Dot Assist on store iPads across North American coffeehouses (Nov 2025), but Starbucks runs the assistant on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI platform rather than on site.

4. Retailers and consumer brands sell inside third-party AI assistants as well as their own apps: The Home Depot's catalog can be browsed in ChatGPT (Mar 2026), Best Buy completed a commerce integration that lets customers buy inside ChatGPT (Aug 2026), Starbucks opened a beta app in ChatGPT that suggests drinks (Apr 2026), and Nike said in May 2026 that U.S. consumers would be able to buy Nike products in Google's Gemini app and AI Mode in Search from early Jun 2026. Nike also offers a running shoe finder inside ChatGPT and runs NikeAI, a conversational shopping assistant, in the Nike App for U.S. iOS users (Jul 2025), but Nike has published no usage figure for any of the 3.

5. Restaurant chains report AI targets and operating measures, not realized returns: McDonald's targets at least 50 labor hours a week per restaurant from Archy and about 250 basis points of restaurant-level efficiency that blends ArchIQ with supply chain and marketing savings (Sep 2026), Chipotle Mexican Grill cites Ava Cado cutting the time from application to start from 12 days to 4 (repeated Jun 2026), and Starbucks gives Smart Queue service times (Jul and Oct 2025) while its $2 billion cost savings program does not separate AI. Starbucks retired its AI inventory counting app in May 2026 after about 9 months, and Texas Roadhouse has put no AI program on the record since May 2025.

6. Several companies in the sector report savings they do not credit to AI, or not to AI alone: Nike expects about $2.5 billion of savings from its Pace program through fiscal 2031 (Oct 2026) and cut about 1,400 Global Operations roles, most of them in Technology (Apr 2026), crediting none of it to AI, Marriott International credited more than $90 million of above-property cost savings in 2025 to an enterprise-wide productivity initiative (Feb 2026), The Home Depot's targeted billions of dollars in productivity (Dec 2025) are credited to automation and AI together, Ford Motor Company CFO Sherry House said on Oct 28, 2026 that efficiencies including AI helped absorb cost headwinds without giving AI's share, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra declined on Oct 20, 2026 to quantify AI-driven fixed-cost savings before GM's 2027 guidance. Duolingo reports what AI costs instead, with Q1 2026 gross margin up 190 basis points to 73.0% on lower per-unit AI costs.

7. Automakers run AI in plants, engineering and vehicles but publish process measures and no company-wide count of employees using AI: General Motors reports battery packs moving through pack assembly 30% faster with PlantBrAIn (Oct 2026) and about 3 times as many merged pull requests in autonomy engineering after AI agents (Jul 2026), Toyota Motor North America's AI team projects at least six figures of annual savings per line, shop or plant for each manufacturing use case (Aug 2026), and Ford Motor Company gives staff FordLLM, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Anthropic tools without saying how many of its about 169,000 employees use them. Ford named Mano Mannoochahr Chief AI and Data Officer in Aug 2026, while General Motors has named no successor to Chief AI Officer Barak Turovsky, who left in Nov 2025.

8. AI ownership differs across the sector's retailers, brands and restaurant chains: Seemantini Godbole became Lowe's Chief Information and AI Officer, reporting to the CEO (Sep 2026), McDonald's created a Chief Data, Analytics and AI Officer role held by Das Dasgupta (Sep 2025), The Home Depot's EVP and CTO Fran Bell has owned technology, data and AI since Apr 2026, and Starbucks' CTO Anand Varadarajan has reported to the CEO since Jan 2026. Nike eliminated its Chief Technology Officer role in Dec 2025 and put Technology under COO Venkatesh Alagirisamy, and Nike has named no head of AI publicly since its vice president of AI left in Jul 2025. AutoZone, Burlington Stores, Ross Stores and Texas Roadhouse name no AI owner, and Domino's Pizza's Chief Technology and Data Officer Kelly Garcia left on Aug 28, 2026.