What:  Falabella's technology investment grew 60% in 2026, with US$265 million of its US$900 million total budget allocated to technology, as the group runs company-wide AI initiatives across its five business units. 

Why it is important: Falabella's investment growth, and the returns it is already generating (US$78 million in AI-referred sales, 20%+ logistics efficiency gains), show that department-store groups can convert AI spending into measurable revenue and operational impact rather than experimental cost.

For one week, more than 1,100 Falabella employees across Chile, Peru, Colombia and India stepped away from their usual roles for PlaAI Week, an initiative testing how artificial intelligence could solve concrete problems across the group's five business units. More than 200 multidisciplinary teams competed over two days, with ten reaching a final judged by the executive committee; CTO Leonardo Di Nucci says the resulting solutions are already being implemented, not merely piloted. The exercise reflects Falabella's broader shift of AI from a technical specialism to a business-embedded capability, following a year in which technology investment rose 60% and the CIO role moved from back-office IT toward proposing solutions directly to the business.

Concrete applications span hyper-personalisation, which Di Nucci says generated more than US$78 million in sales referred to Falabella.com over the past 12 months; a Sodimac virtual assistant that increased purchase intent fivefold by translating customer needs into materials lists; automated customer service handling frequent questions while preserving human escalation; and computer-vision-based truck-load monitoring that lifted route efficiency by more than 20%. With the 2027 budget still being finalised, Di Nucci says spending on digital, e-commerce, AI, data and platforms will keep rising.

IADS Notes:  Falabella's stepped-up technology spending sits within a capex cycle already documented across the group's 2026 activity: a Press Release in July 2026 linked the opening of a small-format store in Angol to the same US$900 million 2026 investment plan, spanning new stores, remodelled locations and technology upgrades across Chile, Peru and Mexico, while a Press Release in September 2026 reported record second-quarter profit of US$242 million and 19% growth in digital GMV, evidence that the group's physical-digital ecosystem investment is translating into measurable returns. The PlaAI Week initiative reflects a broader industry pattern in which AI adoption in retail proceeds gradually and is absorbed into existing roles rather than displacing them, as The Economist argued in September 2025, with organisational change centred on upskilling and workflow redesign rather than wholesale disruption. The scale of returns Falabella attributes to AI-driven personalisation echoes an earlier case at Saks Global, where WWD reported in September 2025 that data on 30 million luxury shoppers was being used to tailor every saks.com homepage to individual preferences, underscoring how granular customer data is increasingly monetised through personalisation across the sector. Falabella's use of computer vision to optimise truck-load capacity parallels Amazon's expansion of AI-driven supply-chain tools, which Retail Dive reported in September 2025 was cutting customs-clearance processing time by more than half, both illustrating how AI is being directed at operational efficiency alongside customer-facing applications.

Falabella's technology investment grew 60% in 2026 as CIO doubles down on AI, data and digital platforms