Samuel Mueller, CEO & Cofounder at Scandit.getty​If you want to know how much a customer trusts your brand, don’t look at app downloads or loyalty sign‑ups. Look at what happens the moment they discover something promised isn’t there.​Maybe it’s a parent who ordered a birthday gift for pickup on their way home. Maybe it’s a weekly grocery trip where an ingredient is marked “in stock” online, only to be missing from the shelf when they arrive. In those moments, the customer doesn’t think about systems, store operations or loyalty points. They just think, “This felt like a waste of my time.”​Over the past decade, retailers have invested heavily in the front‑end experience: from smoother apps to personalized offers. All of that matters. But in 2026, I’m convinced the most important part of customer experience (CX) is the part almost no customer ever sees directly: inventory data accuracy.​The CX Promise Line​Every modern retail promise crosses the same invisible line.​Buy online, pick up in store. Same‑day delivery from local inventory. Substitutions for out‑of‑stock items. Real‑time promotions tied to what’s on the shelf. All of them depend on whether a store’s information system has an accurate, real‑time view of what’s actually there.If that information is reliable, the customer journey feels smooth and dependable. When a store texts “ready in two hours,” it is. When the app says “three left on aisle seven,” they are. Both associates and shoppers can trust the answer.​If that truth layer is wrong, however, everything above it becomes theater. A beautifully designed mobile interface that offers same‑day delivery on an item that exists only as phantom inventory isn’t a great experience with a small bug.​The $1.7 Trillion Warning​This is a financial problem and a huge opportunity at a staggering scale.​IHL Group research puts global retail opportunity cost and direct losses from inventory distortion, out‑of‑stocks and overstocks combined at roughly $1.7 trillion each year, or about 6.5% of total retail sales worldwide. That number has barely budged despite years of investment in planning systems and omnichannel front ends. It's a wake-up call that what retailers believe about their inventory is likely still out of step with what's actually on their shelves.IHL’s recent research shows that profit leaders, defined as the retailers growing faster and earning healthier margins, are investing dramatically more in inventory visibility than their peers. Sometimes at more than 200% the rate of laggards. They’ve moved inventory accuracy from a back‑office concern to a front‑of‑the‑house, board‑level metric tied directly to CX, loyalty and growth.​Profit leaders understand that the cost of bad inventory data is much greater than a missed sale today. It can create or further a broken trust that reduces how often customers come back and how many categories they buy. ​Black Box To Live Feed​For years, most stores have had a significant gap in inventory visibility. Central systems know what was shipped to a location and what was sold at the point of sale. They can infer what “should” be on the shelf. But they often don’t know what was misplaced, what was stolen, what was put back in the wrong aisle or what is sitting in the back room. They don’t know that a price label was never updated or that a promoted SKU is obscured behind a different product.​Layer on top of that the complexity of omnichannel fulfillment: using stores as mini distribution centers for buy-online-pick-up-in-store, ship‑from‑store and curbside pickup. Suddenly, the gap between what the system thinks is available and what a shopper or picker can find becomes a daily source of friction.​This is where store-level intelligence has moved from nice‑to‑have to essential. Vision AI is increasingly powering that shift toward an ever more intelligent store, transforming shelf images into real-time, actionable data on SKU availability, placement and pricing accuracy. Enabling this, SKU-level shelf data is collected continuously using hybrid data capture, which combines mobile devices in the hands of associates, fixed cameras and sometimes autonomous robots to reconcile reality with system records. ​The impact from doing so is both tangible and immediate. In my experience, retailers can push on‑shelf availability up into the mid‑90% to profit lifts by 2% to 4%, experience fewer abandoned orders, fewer apology messages and fewer moments in which an associate is apologizing for what the system claimed to be true.​Designing CX From The Shelf Back​Accepting that inventory accuracy is the foundation of CX changes the roadmap. Instead of starting with a new front‑end feature and asking how to bolt it onto existing data, start with a simple question: How confident are we that what we show a customer is what they will actually find? Then work back from the shelf.​Practically, that means giving associates tools that show them a personalized and prioritized view of guided actions to take at any given time based on the most relevant signals generated by the intelligent store.​When that layer is in place, a lot of familiar pain points start to fade. BOPIS confirmations stick, ship‑from‑store orders require fewer re‑picks and mismatched inventory conversations become rare. And associates spend less time cycle counting and more time helping customers in ways that build loyalty.​A Board Question​Macroeconomic uncertainty hasn’t disappeared. AI investments are accelerating, with many boards asking for quick returns. Major U.S.-based sporting events in 2026 and 2028 will stretch travel, convenience and grocery ecosystems in new ways. In this environment, it’s tempting to chase the next headline technology.​My advice is more foundational: Before adding another layer of customer promises, make sure the most important promise is grounded in operational truth.​That’s why inventory accuracy, enabled by vision AI, now belongs on the board agenda as a core CX and operational efficiency driver. Think about asking how often our systems are breaking customer promises rather than just focusing on an overall in-stock percentage. The most important thing that can be offered to customers is simple: When something says it’s there, it really is.​​​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?