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- Artificial selection: almost half of retailers intend to reduce staff costs due to AI
Artificial selection: almost half of retailers intend to reduce staff costs due to AI
Artificial intelligence is changing not only retailers' approaches to work, but also their need for staff. Almost every second Russian retail company plans to reduce employee costs in the coming year due to the introduction of AI, "Izvestia" has learned. Business interest in such technologies is growing against the background of declining profitability and increased competition for customers. Companies are already using AI to recruit staff, set prices, and optimize their retail space. At the same time, the share of retailers investing in IT for business development increased to 74% over the year. How the introduction of AI will change the labor market in Russian retail is in the "Izvestia" material.
How does retail expect to save on automation of operations
Almost every second retailer — 42% — plans to reduce staff costs in the coming year due to the introduction of artificial intelligence, a September survey by "B1" (formerly Ernst & Young, EY) showed. Among the companies operating in the segments of food, household goods, household appliances and electronics, the share of such respondents reached 50%. At the same time, 24.6% of retailers surveyed do not associate the introduction of AI with changes in labor costs, and another 33.3% have not yet decided. In total, analysts surveyed 77 companies, including 57 retail chains, 12 manufacturers and eight other market participants.
Companies expect to reduce costs primarily by automating individual operations, the study says. Already, against the background of the introduction of AI and robotics, the productivity of employees in performing routine tasks has increased by 15%, said a representative of "Magnit". At Fix Price, about 50% of candidates for line positions are selected by the Vocamate AI recruiting robot, said Anton Maksimenko, the company's HR director. According to him, the retailer also uses AI to work with the assortment, produce advertising materials, design and document management. "Thanks to the use of AI in the field of development, Magnit has managed to accelerate the implementation of ideas for creating new products and improving existing ones six times," the company representative added.
In commerce, these technologies are used to automate pricing, manage promotions and inventory, as well as calculate contract prices and costs, according to the "B1" data. In particular, the use of AI to identify empty shelves in salesrooms can increase turnover by about 1%. "Smart scales with product recognition function save cashiers up to one hour a day," said a Magnit representative.
In "Yandex Shop", AI is used to create product cards, a representative of the service said. Neural networks help form names and descriptions, recognize information on packages, translate content, and identify errors. According to him, this almost halves the amount of manual work and speeds up catalog updates.
According to estimates by McKinsey and EuroCommerce, the introduction of AI can increase retailers' EBITDA by 4-10 percentage points due to sales growth, assortment optimization, pricing, procurement, logistics and other processes. EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation.
""Izvestia" also sent inquiries to X5 and "VkusVill". "Scooter" and "Auchan" representatives declined to comment.
How AI Helps Companies Cut Costs but Not Fire People
The introduction of AI is taking place against the background of a decrease in retail profitability. About 42% of companies participating in the "B1" survey reported a drop in this indicator in the first half of 2026. 67% of retailers named the struggle for a buyer as one of the key challenges, inflationary pressure and lower margins - 60%, automation and AI integration — 37%. At the same time, the share of companies that included IT business development projects in the top three areas of investment increased by 22 percentage points over the year, to 74%.
Reducing staff costs does not necessarily mean reducing staff, says Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of INFOLine. According to him, the economic effect is to reduce the need for human labor per unit of operation. As a result, the same amount of work can be performed by a smaller team, and a growing business can be serviced without a proportional increase in the number of employees, said the head of development of AI "M.The video" Ivan Budnik. AI helps retailers avoid "inflating" their budgets and hiring people unnecessarily, Anton Maksimenko agrees.
For retail chains, this mechanism is especially noticeable due to the high turnover of line staff, Mikhail Burmistrov noted. According to him, it is possible to partially reduce the number of employees without layoffs — simply by hiring fewer people to replace those who left. """" So, in March last year, the CEO of X5 ("Pyaterochka", "Crossroads", "Chizhik") Igor Shekhterman said that after 2025, the company does not plan to increase the number of staff, even with the growth of the business. By the end of the same year, X5 employed 389,000 people, 9,000 fewer than a year earlier. At the same time, labor productivity increased by 4% during this period. The company also estimated the contribution of AI solutions implemented in 2025 at 5 billion rubles of additional operating profit.
At the same time, the impact of technology on employment will vary in stores and office units, Mikhail Burmistrov emphasized. In retail outlets, a significant part of the work remains physical: employees receive and post goods, collect orders and help customers. AI is able to plan the workload more accurately and reduce the amount of administrative work, but it cannot perform these operations instead of humans, the expert explained. The potential for reducing the need for personnel in contact centers, internal support services, accounting, legal departments and IT is much higher, where a significant part of the tasks are related to information processing, the expert believes.
So, in "Yandex Shop", the AI assistant for the directors of darkstores collects data from work chats, trackers and internal pages in one place, a representative of the service said. According to him, if earlier it could take up to an hour to find an answer to a work question, now it takes about five minutes.
In 2021, IKEA launched an AI-based chatbot to process typical user requests that were received daily by call centers: order status, availability of goods in stores, and return conditions. This allowed the company to retrain about 8.5 thousand employees of contact centers for remote interior consultants. In June 2025, Amazon CEO Andy Jassi warned employees that the proliferation of generative AI and AI agents could eventually lead to a reduction in the total number of corporate staff.
At the same time, the economic effect of technology implementation should be assessed not by the number of "saved hours", but by reducing the total cost of operations while maintaining quality, Mikhail Burmistrov believes.
According to S&P Global, within a year after the introduction of generative AI, the need for labor may decrease by an average of 7.5%. McKinsey predicts that up to 75% of retail positions may change significantly under the influence of AI. At the same time, in recent months, AI has begun to behave unpredictably, which made developers think about the need to strengthen control over such models. This problem, in particular, was reported by OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT).
AI is changing the structure of work, but it is not replacing workers, experts say. More complex tasks — decision-making, customer service, and product development — are still left to people, Ivan Budnik concluded.
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