Unified Commerce as a Growth Multiplier

As retailers race to figure out AI, the conversation keeps coming back to whether their underlying data infrastructure can support it.

The answer exposes a gap that omnichannel retail, for all its promises and progress, never fully closed. It was a necessary north star for streamlining the customer experience, but it never led to the full connection of the systems powering it. And AI requires all systems to work seamlessly together to reach its full potential.

Unified commerce is the natural architectural response. It’s the bridge between where retail has been and where AI is taking it, but it’s a harder problem to solve than most retailers want to admit or vendors let on.

Gartner examined the state of affairs in its Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Retail Technologies, 2025 and Gartner® Market Guide for Unified Commerce Platforms Anchored by POS for Tier 1 Retailers. As a referenced vendor in each, we’ll offer our perspective on the critical role unified commerce will play in establishing retail’s winners in the new era of AI-enabled commerce.

From Omnichannel to Unified Commerce

The idea of a unified system landscape in retail is not new, yet many retail companies have been hesitant to implement it so far. To deliver unified customer experience, many companies are already successfully putting the omnichannel concept into practice, but the component of comprehensive data exchange is missing.

• Omnichannel connects all customer-facing touchpoints such as websites, social media, and stores; to create a unified customer experience. However, backend systems often remain separate, meaning that information such as inventory data is not reliably shared.
• Unified Commerce additionally integrates all front-end and back-end systems into a single platform. This makes all data available in real time. For customers, this means reliable information such as in-store availability without any surprises when they arrive.

This comparison shows that while omnichannel creates consistent brand experience, it reaches its limits without end-to-end system integration. Unified Commerce creates a fully connected ecosystem that offers customers reliable information and true real-time experiences and provides companies with the foundation for more efficient processes and better decisions.

AI as a Catalyst for Implementing Unified Commerce

In retail, competition for AI integration is accelerating rapidly, meaning it’s a critical time to get the technological foundation right.

While AI can help bridge existing data silos, its greatest value is realized only when a unified data layer has already been established prior to implementation. Those who plan to build Unified Commerce only after the fact risk complex integration projects, higher costs, and noticeable delays in ROI.

This makes it all the more important to establish Unified Commerce as a stable foundation before AI is rolled out on a large scale because only on this basis can AI realize its full potential and quickly deliver sustainable value: faster rollouts, seamless integration, consistent customer experiences, and fewer surprises when new initiatives transition from pilot to production.

A clear example of an AI application in retail is automated price management. For a pricing solution to be fully effective, it requires a solid data foundation and tight integration with the backend architecture. To ensure smooth and consistent data exchange, the use of a unified commerce platform is particularly advantageous. Fashion and sports retailer L&T Lengermann & Trieschmann earned a reta-Award for their implementation of automated pricing across brick-and-mortar locations, powered by GK AIR Price Optimizer. The solution enables automated, transparent, and profitable pricing decisions in real time, and GK Software is recognized in the Gartner® Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies, 2025.

Holistic Personalization with Unified Commerce

AI-based personalization is another key application which delivers its greatest value when it is built on a holistic system that optimally integrates all customer touchpoints.

As IHL Group notes in its POS/mPOS Market Study 2025, “In modern retail, everything revolves around personalization… This capability directly drives customer retention, repurchase rates, and wallet share. Sophisticated personalization can increase conversion rates by 10–15% and customer lifetime value by 20–30%.”

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2025 also highlights that: “customers increasingly expect personalization when interacting with retailers, thus driving retailer investments in technologies that support relevant, timely and more meaningful interactions.”

GK as a Strong Partner for Unified Commerce

To scale innovation, a stable foundation is needed, and that is exactly what Unified Commerce provides. GK offers a central platform for this purpose, used globally by leading retailers such as Adidas, Aldi, Coop, Lidl, Migros, and Walmart International.

Our platform enables seamless shopping experiences at every touchpoint: at the POS, on mobile devices, in self-service, and on smart devices; fully integrated and flexibly scalable. Thanks to its modular architecture and robust API foundation, it can quickly adapt to changing customer expectations and supports both customer-specific innovations and retailers’ various deployment models.

We believe, this capability is recognized by leading analysts such as Gartner®. GK Software was listed in the Gartner® Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies, 2025 as a provider of a unified commerce platform anchored by a point-of-sale (POS) system. In addition, the Gartner® Market Guide for Unified Commerce Platforms Anchored by POS for Tier 1 provides a detailed overview of GK CLOUD4RETAIL solution.

And beyond Gartner®, GK solutions are featured in numerous other analyst reports and awards. Learn more here.

Ready to dig in? Schedule time with our experts.

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies, 2025, 7 July 2025

Gartner, Market Guide for Unified Commerce Platforms Anchored by POS for Tier 1 Retailers, 29 September 2025

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2025, 2 July 2025

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