AI on the shop floor and the changing role of the supermarket team leader

In early 2026 McKinsey and EuroCommerce, the European trade association for retail and wholesale, surveyed more than 35 executives of supermarket chains and more than 15,000 consumers in 14 European countries. Of the executives, 47 per cent put AI and automation in their top three priorities, just behind cost and margin pressure. The returns lag behind: 70 per cent see no measurable effect on business results yet or say it is too early to tell, and 3 per cent report an increase of more than 5 per cent. Only 8 per cent have agentic AI in regular use, and not a single chain deploys agents widely across departments. According to the report’s analysis, AI agents could take over 40 to 50 per cent of routine tasks at a supermarket head office. The report expects that in some cases team leaders will manage people and agents together and divide the work between them, and that category teams will be able to manage more categories. In the short term, robots will stay mainly in distribution centres and back-of-store warehouses; the first trials on the shop floor have begun, with counting stock and spotting empty shelves as possible uses.

Between 13 October and 19 November 2025 Deloitte surveyed 330 retail executives worldwide, 86 per cent of whom work at companies with revenue of at least a billion dollars. Almost 68 per cent expect to deploy agentic AI for key operational and company-wide tasks within 12 to 24 months.

At Albert Heijn, the largest Dutch supermarket chain, AI is already in use on the shop floor. In an interview published by Ahold Delhaize in September 2026, Sjoerd Holleman, a member of Albert Heijn’s executive team, and Noortje van Genugten say that more than 80,000 employees use the AI assistant for store staff, with more than 50,000 conversations a week. The first use was product questions, such as where something is, stock levels, prices and promotions. For an app that tells bakers which bread to bake in each baking round, something experienced staff used to decide themselves, the chain held information evenings in every store; according to Van Genugten, the roll-out was almost a bigger job than building the app. Store managers, she says, now spend a lot of time at the computer and on email, turning information into tasks for their staff. The chain is exploring how agents could take this over, giving managers more time to coach staff and look after customers. Holleman expects managers to direct both people and agents in future. This is the company’s own account.

How the shop floor experiences this was surveyed by Retail Week and Rotageek, a supplier of rostering software, among 500 UK retail staff for the report Talking Shop 2026. Of these, 44 per cent say digital change comes from above without input from the shop floor, rising to 51 per cent among 16 to 35-year-olds. A third worry that technology will take over parts of their own job, 30 per cent think AI helps the day-to-day running of the store and 41 per cent don’t know. In open answers, staff say new tools often arrive with little explanation or training.

How solid is the evidence? Supermarket and retail executives expect a great deal of agents, but the applications are still rarely in wide use and the results are not yet visible. That the team leader will also manage agents is the expectation of one consultancy and one Dutch chain. The voice of the shop floor comes from a single UK survey by a software supplier.