What: UK wholesale and retail businesses remain among the slowest sectors to adopt AI, despite rising use across the wider economy.

Why it is important: Slow and shallow AI adoption could weaken retail competitiveness as leading players use the technology to improve efficiency, decision-making, and customer experience.

New ONS data shows that wholesale and retail businesses are among the slowest adopters of AI in the UK economy. Based on a June 2026 survey, 15.7% of businesses in the sector said they had used at least one AI technology, while 4.8% had used multiple tools. This places wholesale and retail near the bottom of the adoption ranking, ahead only of transport and logistics, and construction. By contrast, 58.3% of ICT firms and 50.7% of education businesses reported using at least one AI technology.The ONS said AI use across the economy has nearly tripled since late 2023, but adoption remains shallow and limited to a few tools, suggesting limited transformative impact so far. The wholesale and retail category covers 396,000 businesses, 54% of which are retailers, and larger companies are more likely to have adopted AI than smaller ones. Retail Week’s AI Investment Tracker shows stronger momentum among major retailers, with 38 reported AI examples in 2026, compared with 26 in 2025.

IADS Notes: Recent coverage shows that the ONS figures reflect a broader divide between superficial AI experimentation and meaningful retail transformation. In June 2026, BCG found that many retailers and CPG companies had launched AI pilots, but only a minority were scaling them effectively or connecting them to financial outcomes. Retail Touchpoints in January 2026 showed that early movers were gaining efficiency, customer experience, and revenue benefits from domain-specific and agentic models trained on proprietary data, while Bain & Company in December 2025 described the wider shift from pilots to production as dependent on leadership, workflow redesign, governance, and workforce upskilling. BCG in November 2025 further illustrated how AI-first retailers such as Walmart and Sephora were embedding AI into automation and customer engagement, creating a contrast with the ONS finding that wholesale and retail sits near the bottom of sector adoption rankings. Deloitte in September 2025 reinforces the same point: legacy systems, costs, regulation, cybersecurity, and low workforce readiness continue to hold back scalable AI adoption.

Wholesale and retail businesses slower to adopt AI than other sectors, says ONS