Retail doesn't have a data shortage: it has a blindness problem

Retail has a blindness problem. And it's not for lack of data.

I work with customer behavior data every single day. I see how people move, where they stop, what they touch, when they hesitate, where they walk out.
And what frustrates me most isn't what's missing. It's what's there in excess that nobody looks at.
According to Gartner, 70-80% of what companies spend on technology goes into maintaining systems that don't talk to each other. Not into getting insights. Into keeping the machinery running.

Translation: they have the data. They just don't read it.
I've seen dashboards with 47 charts where nobody changed a single decision after looking at them. Weekly reports that get filed away unopened. Cutting-edge technology feeding decisions that are still being made on the gut feeling of whoever's manager that shift.

The problem isn't the tool. The tool is brilliant. The problem is that between the data and the decision there's a huge gap called interpretation. And no software is going to save you there. There, you need someone who knows how to ask why.
There are way too many platforms. What's missing is people who can translate a number into a story and a story into an action.

Data doesn't talk. Insight does. But without action, an insight is just a nice sentence in a report nobody reads.