Intelligent Management Forum
2025

30 senior executives from 20 of the nation’s largest retailers came together recently at the Intelligent Management Forum to explore the future of store performance and leadership. 

Their cry for help was loud and clear: store operations have become more complex; store teams and managers are overwhelmed; and so store execution and performance are under pressure.

The executives in attendance identified four focus areas – and shared their perspectives on how Quorso’s intelligent management platform can help.

(Intelligent management platforms use data and AI to guide, connect and automate the real-time work of operators across an organization.)

1 .  De-tasking the store

Store teams spend much of their time executing compliance tasks. With increasing pressure on labor budgets, retailers must now get the ‘biggest bang from every buck’  they spend on a store associate.

Today’s approach to task management is, however, wasteful for two reasons:

•     Pencil-whipping: store teams often check off a task without completing the underlying action.

One major U.S. retailer saw 90% of stores ‘complete’ a Pop-up Promotion (PoP), only to receive an email from the vendor a few days later apologizing for not having sent out the PoP yet.

At a global top 10 retailer, 20-30% of some tasks were found to be falsely ‘completed’.

Pencil-whipping undermines Store Operations’ chain of command and can cause problems upstream for Merchandising and Supply Chain.

•   Wasted effort:  15-20% of store tasks are wasteful, in that they do little to improve store standards or performance. Some are annoying reminders for actions an associate or manager remembers anyway (e.g., ‘submit labor schedule’). Some are for actions that may be irrelevant because, e.g., a truck hasn’t arrived. And some (increasingly) are for ‘unprofitable’ actions.

One VP Store Operations expressed his worry that the growth of computer vision and IOT devices is generating too much ‘busy work’: e.g., real-time tasks to replenish SKUs off-cycle whose incremental sales will not pay for the extra labor.

In today’s tough trading environment, retailers can’t afford any of these three types of wasted effort.

The assembled execs looked to Quorso’s intelligent task feature to automatically identify instances of pencil whipping by using data and AI to identify whether a task has truly been completed.

One large grocer uses Quorso to monitor sales and inventory changes on SKUs that are on promotion. By alerting when sales of items did not ramp up in line with other stores on promotion, Quorso was able to improve promotion compliance 65% in 3 weeks.

Similarly, most executives were already using (or are planning to use) Quorso’s more dynamic approach in order to reduce waste. For example, for routine, repeating tasks, reminders should only be generated when a team member forgets. Contingent tasks, which depend on, say, a truck or promotion arriving, should only be triggered when the prior event has happened. And the cost of each new task prompted, e.g., by computer vision, should be dynamically evaluated against the predicted bottom-line impact of executing it.

2 .  A Single Pane of Glass

The average store manager uses 20+ apps and systems, 50+ reports, and receives dozens of emails each week. No wonder 86% of managers complain they are overwhelmed.

A single ‘super-app’ which unifies all Store and Field Leaders’ work in one tool with one type of user workflow is, therefore, an appealing North Star.

But what actually is in this ‘Single Pane of Glass’? Well no one seemed quite sure. And no one had seen a truly compelling example from a retailer. Yes, many leading retailers have wrapper apps which bring together the main tools on a single home-screen, with shared authentication. But as one attendee who has personally led a successful super-app deployment pointed out, given retailers’ desire to swap between different third-party tools every few years, deep integrations into a common user front-end is probably ambitious.

« Quorso was felt to be as close to the Single Pane of Glass for Store and Field Leaders as anything. Not only does it combine tasks, alerts, exceptions, walks, audits, micro-training, tickets and much more in a single ‘to-do list’ with a single UX and workflow – integrating interoperably with other systems (e.g., ServiceNow) when needed. But it also intelligently prioritizes between all these for each user personally, suggesting the highest value actions for each user in near real-time. »

3 .  The Evolving Field Leader role

Today, District Managers and other Field Leaders spend too much time diagnosing problems – either by digging through a mess of siloed KPIs and dashboards, or walking stores to spot issues manually.

Even with their best efforts, it’s incredibly hard to know which store performance issues matter most, or to pinpoint the root causes driving them. For example:

“We wasted $5,000 in chuck steak yesterday because the markdown process wasn’t followed – fourth time this week!”

But now, AI tools like Quorso are empowering store teams to identify and fix many of these types of issues independently and in near real-time. And that means that some of the District and Field Leaders’ traditional role is likely to disappear.

However, that shift creates a new and exciting opportunity. Leveraging root cause data from intelligent apps, District Managers can become tech-enabled super-coaches – focused less on chasing problems, more on solving the harder, human-rooted ones. For example:

“Why is store 123 struggling with this markdown process? Actually, this seems to be a broader problem across my district.”

This evolution can make the DM role more strategic, rewarding, and people-centric.

4 .  The Role of AI: Human vs Machine

AI technologies can be enormously powerful for retailers. All forms of AI have their benefits and disadvantages, though. For example, Generative AI is, of course, unparalleled at searching, summarizing, structuring and creating content. However, it is non-deterministic: i.e.,it will usually produce different outputs from the same inputs. And it is prone to hallucinate.

These characteristics run counter to the human control that many retailers have relied on to build their business. For example, imagine a Gen AI hallucinating product recalls or recommending different stores to visit every time a DM refreshes the prompt.

We therefore asked the executives to share their views on where they would be happy to surrender some human control to AI in running their stores and where they wanted their hands firmly on the tiller. Here are two contrasting examples of where they felt AI should be used:

•   Triggering work for Store and Field Leaders: most executives felt uncomfortable with the idea of a fully autonomous AI choosing what work their teams should do each day. However, they were much more comfortable with a scenario where they defined the parameters to trigger work (e.g., sales decline) and let machine learning optimize those parameters. They also wanted the ability to override the ML, though, and force critical work (e.g., product recalls) into a team member’s task list.

•   Coaching: by contrast, once an operational problem has been identified, most executives were very comfortable with Generative AI creating personalized coaching on how to resolve it, drawing on the company’s knowledge base of SOPs.

This need to blend human control with AI optimization is why Quorso’s intelligent management platform uses a variety of AI technologies to support different aspects of a manager’s cognitive process.