AI-Driven Shelves Are Changing Carrefour’s In-Store Experience

French supermarket giant Carrefour is accelerating its digital transformation by creating the next generation of connected stores, with artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in its omnichannel retail strategy.

“AI technology is at the core of the strategy,” said Emmanuel Grenier, group eCommerce, data and digital transformation director at Carrefour, during a presentation at the recent Viva Tech 2025 conference in Paris.

Grenier said he has three convictions:

The future of retail will be omnichannel, where people shop online and in stores.

eCommerce will occur in the stores, with 70% of online orders being prepared in the physical stores.

Technology will be a key differentiator.

Why digitize physical stores? Grenier said 90% of the company’s sales are still made in the stores.

Carrefour’s technology goals are twofold: “We are using technology to improve the customer experience, and the second one the employees,” Grenier said. “We are using technology to empower the teams and to enable them to be more efficient in the stores.”

One of those technologies aims to digitize store shelves at Carrefour, in partnership with VusionGroup. The shelves will have cameras to spot product shortages and shopper purchase behavior. The shelves can use Bluetooth technology to dynamically “communicate” with the shopper and offer promotions in real time.

The cameras are similar to “someone looking at the shelves, scanning the shelves every hour and taking a photo and giving feedback to the system and employees,” Grenier said. “We’ll be more efficient, and there are a lot of new use cases coming.”

This system comprises a smart rail that provides power and data connectivity to a broad range of digital IoT devices such as electronic price labels, marketing labels, cameras and sensors that operate as a unified data platform, according to VusionGroup.

“Digitization is going to make stores into major data assets,” said Thierry Gadou, chairman and CEO of VusionGroup, in conversation with Grenier. “Computer vision and sensors are going to ‘data-fy’ the stores … and provide unprecedented shelf and supply chain transparency.”

For shoppers, stores will become “way more user-friendly, interactive and personalized,” Gadou said. “For employees, automation and AI is going to radically change their day-to-day jobs.”

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Data Is the Name of the Grocer’s Game

According to a 2025 PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Data-Driven Advantage: How Grocery and Retail Merchants Can Accelerate Growth,” leveraging real-time data is the secret to staying competitive in today’s retail landscape.

Consider the following findings from the report:

Seventy percent of grocery merchants with data-ready businesses reported revenue growth in the past year.

More than 65% of grocery and retail merchants cannot access real-time supply chain data, yet more than 70% say it is crucial to business decision-making.

More than half of retail and grocery merchants have limited data sharing across departments, missing out on revenue growth boosts of up to 5%.

Gadou also cited a study showing that digitization of stores would add two to three percentage points to the operating margin, which is “massive” in the low-margin grocery business.

Both Gadou and Grenier stressed the transformative potential of this data-driven approach, especially for employees.

“Tomorrow, an employee would be able to ask his mobile in his app, saying, ‘Tell me what’s out of stock? Tell me what are the discrepancies in assortment? Tell me which prices are incorrect?’” Grenier said. “The app will tell him … what to do and where to go in the store to solve that.”

Beyond efficiency, both executives see retail as a media asset. “The physical store is the next big digital media,” Gadou said. “You need to digitize the store… to leverage that traffic.”

Grenier agreed, noting that retail media is about being able to “communicate, target and measure the impact on the sales.”

The collaboration also opens up avenues for stronger supplier partnerships.

“The digitalization of stores, which are really today, the single point of failure of the whole data in the value chain, would really help to create a better collaboration,” Gadou said.

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