Why trust, time, and cost have kept Consumer Industries from acting on what their data already knows
by Rob Saker
*Retail, CPG, and travel lose value to the same gap between signal and action, taxed three ways: trust, time, and cost. Forrester estimates 60% to 73% of enterprise data goes unused for analytics, and this piece argues AI deployed as a system, not a collection of pilots, is the first technology built to attack all three taxes at once.
*Three movements turn dead signal into action: dark data becomes signal, probabilistic reasoning expands the question space, and human capability decouples from headcount. Proof points already in market include Harmons cutting out-of-stocks by more than half through shelf-scanning, Airbus Skywise reading telemetry across 12,000+ connected aircraft, and Walmart's Ask Sam giving first-week associates a veteran's recall.
*Governance, not the model, is the real competitive moat. The Databricks Platform lets enterprises widen the aperture, prove trustworthy reasoning, and act at machine speed on one governed foundation, positioning them for a shift McKinsey projects could redirect $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global retail spending to AI agents by 2030.
