In February, Retail Week upgraded its Intelligent Answers (iA) service, which uses AI to scour the archive to answer your pressing questions. 

Intelligent Answers (iA) is our in-house generative AI-powered tool that taps into thousands of articles on retail-week.com to bring you instant summaries complete with clickable links for further reading. 

Unlike other generative AI platforms, which source content from across the open web, all iA answers are based solely on Retail Week’s unparalleled, factual coverage of the industry, including news, analysis, features, interviews, reports, and exclusive industry data. 

Intelligent Answers is the best way to use AI to explore retail-week.com. You can be confident that every article has been created, fact-checked, and published by a team that has been trusted by the industry for nearly 40 years. 

Find out more about how iA from Retail Week works: http://retail-week.com/ask-ia

Here, we look at what they’ve been asking in the last three months and showcase some of the articles informing the answers. 

Strong curiosity about AI

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AI and technology account for the most questions, with nearly one in three inquiries being about retail’s rapid digital development.

The questions (such as: “Which retailers are using AI to improve customer experience?”) show readers want to go beyond the latest announcements to see where their peers are applying AI, deeper explanations of what it actually does, and if it’s delivering a return on investment. 

In recent weeks, Retail Week has explored how new technology is transforming retail operations from forecasting to marketing, while agentic AI and the spread of digital customer assistants have also prompted questions.

Meanwhile, our recently launched AI Investment Tracker summarises where retailers are focusing their efforts. 

The bottom line

Questions about retailers’ financial performance are popular, but readers are also looking at the bigger picture, with the economic pressures facing the industry looming over some questions, such as:

  • “How would you describe UK retail growth in 2026?”
  • “What is the recent effect of the war on retail?”
  • “Latest retail news around liquidations”

Ask these questions or your own to explore the topics that matter to you.

The top five most asked about companies 

  1. Tesco
  2. Marks & Spencer
  3. Primark
  4. Sainsbury’s
  5. JD Sports

When a company is named directly, it is most often about their strategy or their pay.

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