Grocery's Tech Budget Is Growing. The Important Question Is What It's Actually Solving

Progressive Grocer's 2026 Grocery Tech Trends Study surveyed 70 grocery retailers and found something worth considering carefully: when it comes to back-end technology, grocers aren't chasing shiny objects. They're chasing two specific jobs, and together those two jobs describe exactly what 11Ants was built to do.

Ninety-six percent of grocery retailers expect to maintain or increase tech spend this year. Sixty percent will spend more than they did last year. On the surface, that reads like an industry in a spending spree. Dig into where the money is actually going, and a much more disciplined picture emerges.

The stat that matters more than it looks

Buried in PG's back-end technology findings is this line: workforce technology for training and retention, and data analytics platforms and reporting tools, tied as grocers' top back-end priority, each chosen by 34% of respondents as one of their top three focus areas for the next 12 to 18 months. AI and machine-learning solutions came in close behind, at 31%.

The ordering matters. Grocers aren't ranking AI above everything else as an abstract mandate from the board. They're ranking the jobs first: get the team trained and retained, get the data turned into something a person can act on. AI shows up inside those jobs, not instead of them.

That's precisely the gap 11Ants sits in. 11Ants isn't a bolt-on AI feature competing for its own line item in next year's budget. It's the connective tissue between those two top priorities: it takes the reporting and analytics layer grocers already say they need and adds Ant, its AI analyst, so 11Ants does the work of a data analyst a retailer often can't hire, retain, or scale fast enough to hire.

The talent gap is the whole plot

PG's survey surfaces the tension underneath all of this. Sixty-seven percent of retailers already feel positioned to succeed in grocery's digital future, and 74% believe their existing front-line workforce is coachable enough to get there. But only 66% say they actually have the tech talent they need today. That's a staffing problem, not a confidence one. Grocers know the digital future is coming, they trust their people to rise to it, and they still can't hire their way to the specialist bench they'd need to do it the old way.

This is the exact shape of problem an AI-powered retail intelligence platform is supposed to solve. It doesn't replace the workforce grocers are already investing in training and retaining; it gives that workforce a productivity multiplier that behaves like a specialist analyst on call. Instead of a merchandising manager waiting on a data team that doesn't have the headcount, or a category lead exporting spreadsheets to try to spot an out-of-stock pattern themselves, 11Ants delivers that analysis, through Ant, in the time it takes to ask the question.

Why "nice to have" is the wrong lens

It would be easy to file AI-driven analytics under the same bucket as electronic shelf labels or in-store QR codes: useful, incremental, add-it-when-you-get-to-it. PG's own data argues against that framing. Fifty-one percent of retailers say e-commerce will drive the most growth over the next 12 to 18 months, and 49% say the same of AI and machine learning, nearly tied, and both ahead of everything else on the list. Seventy-three percent have already implemented AI/ML solutions or plan to in the next year and a half. This isn't an experimentation phase anymore; PG's own framing is that AI has “moved from interest to implementation.”

In an industry moving that fast, the tools that win aren't the ones that add another dashboard to check. They're the ones that fold into the two jobs grocers already named as their top priority (equipping the team and making sense of the data) without asking retailers to solve their tech-talent shortage first. That's the difference between a platform being a “nice to have” and being the thing that lets a lean team do a specialist's job at the speed grocery now demands.

The takeaway

Grocers have already told us, in their own survey responses, what they're trying to get done: retain and train their people, and turn their data into decisions. 11Ants doesn't ask retailers to pick a third priority called “AI.” It's built to make the first two priorities faster, and per PG's own numbers, that's exactly where the industry says it's headed next.

Source: Progressive Grocer, "The 2026 Grocery Tech Trends Study," by Julia Tabisz, published 8/17/2026.