Accenture bets AI will ring up retail sales with Profitmind investment

Accenture is betting that the future of retail will run through AI with an investment in Profitmind, an agent-based platform that automates pricing decisions, inventory management, and planning. "Profitmind bridges the gap between insight and action through agentic AI," Accenture global retail lead Jill Standish said in a statement that announced Accenture's buy in. "It mirrors how retailers run their businesses, linking data from multiple sources for clear, prioritized recommendations that can be trusted and executed quickly in response to an increasingly competitive industry." Neither party released the terms of the investment. Accenture Ventures, the company's venture capital arm that focuses on early stage startups in AI, provided the funding. "Profitmind brings a transformative technology that identifies and quantifies performance opportunities across a retail business," the startup's CEO Mark Chrystal told The Register via email. "Because AI is increasingly automating merchandising and pricing, you need a system like Profitmind to stay on top of the market and respond to it. Further, Profitmind, within its Marketing Agent, has the ability to create Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) optimized product copy that increases the likelihood that AI search agents will find and recommend their products." Count Salesforce among those who agree that the next wave of retail will be dependent on AI, both behind the scenes and in front of the customers. The CRM platform released a look at online holiday sales data on Thursday that it says shows 2025 marked a turning point for AI-assisted shopping as the share of global and US traffic from third-party AI search doubled over last year. The study found that AI and AI agents drove $262 billion, or about 20 percent of 2025's holiday spend amid what it said was a record breaking year for online sales that amounted to $1.29 trillion globally. Salesforce said that, even amid higher prices, online holiday sales grew seven percent globally and four percent in the US where online sales reached $294 billion. And organizations which deployed their own AI agents – Pandora, SharkNinja and Funko – saw an average growth of 6.2 percent in holiday sales year over year, compared to 3.9 percent growth among those companies that did not. "Beyond answering their questions, these agents also took direct action on behalf of customers, handling 142% more tasks than they had in the prior two months. These tasks include updating delivery addresses and initiating returns, which are manual, resource-intensive tasks for human reps," Salesforce's study found. If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff NatWest banks on AWS and Accenture for AI-driven customer overhaul UK tech job openings climb 21% to pre-pandemic highs Accenture: DOGE's federal procurement review is hurting our sales Chrystal said that the Salesforce study reinforces the need for his platform which monitors the prices, assortments, and marketing of competitors in real-time. He also posited that, by teaming with Accenture, the company can scale to global customers and identify areas where they need to build new capabilities. "Accenture brings their expertise in transformation, business process change, implementation and business case development," he told us via email. "Together, we believe we offer the full capability set to both deliver tools and transformation to positively impact any retail business." During the National Retail Federation show next week, Microsoft will demonstrate Profitmind deployed on Azure at its booth. Redmond will also explain how its customers can gain faster access and support for the implementation of Profitmind through their partnership platform, Chrystal said. ®