AI is Cutting Entry-level Jobs. Could the Opposite be Happening in Retail Merchandising?

Nearly a quarter (22 percent) of human resource leaders reported at least a partial freeze in entry-level hiring due to AI automation in recent quarters, according to a July Gartner survey.

Even though AI is trimming early career opportunities across sectors, one area may be seeing an opposite trend. Retail merchandising, a field responsible for displaying and managing a brand's products in a physical store, is becoming more accessible for workers with limited experience—and all because of AI.

Ruslan Okhrimovych, CEO of AI-powered retail execution platform Effie AI, displayed this capability at a booth at the Promotion Optimization Institute (POI) Summit in Chicago last spring.

"We had a booth with PepsiCo products, and we gave our application to visitors," said Okhrimovych. "We said, 'Just do what the application is asking you.' They executed everything that was told...to perfect store standards of PepsiCo, not even knowing anything about them."

Roughly 80% of retail sales still happen in physical stores, and retailers lose $125 billion in sales each year due to poor visual merchandising, according to a report from One Door last year. The 2026 Consumer Goods State of the Industry Report from POI adds that 78 percent of CPG companies are dissatisfied with their ability to execute effectively at the shelf.

Companies and professionals largely view retail merchandising as a complex job with several moving parts. For example, PepsiCo's store standards playbook is around 250 pages, according to Okhrimovych. Retail merchandisers hystorically needed to know most of this information.

"A lot of merchandising is rule-based," said Denis Baranov, head of the retail and distribution practice at data consulting partner DataArt. "Products need to be placed on certain shelves, at certain heights, next to particular products, and displays change depending on promotions. The harder part is applying those rules in individual stores. Traditionally, someone new to merchandising might shadow a more experienced colleague to learn how to handle those differences."

Agentic AI actively lowers the amount of knowledge people need up front, effectively creating a job with "zero onboarding," Okhrimovych said.

Okhrimovych argued that Effie AI's merchandising agent—which automates image analysis and compliance checks for often extensive brand guidelines and preferences—takes the guesswork out of the job. Still, the human element remains a critical part of the process.

"AI is taking over repetitive cognitive tasks," said Okhrimovych. "Humans become valuable in physical execution and human-to-human interaction. It's quite a challenge to build a relationship with humans using AI." He went on to say that merchandisers free up to 56% of their time using agentic AI, giving them an opportunity to focus on building relationships with store managers, negotiating for better shelf space and secondary placements, selling promotions and activation opportunities and more. "They can understand local context and store-specific priorities, and the most important part, they can build trust," he added.

Baranov noted that the shift to agentic AI in retail merchandising could have a two-fold effect. Firstly, it could promote more gig work opportunities in the field.

"The crowdsourced audit apps already exist, but today they mostly send people in to take photos and answer questions, because the actual merchandising still needs someone who knows what a compliant shelf looks like," Baranov explained. "Agentic AI removes that constraint...I can easily imagine a version where you go to the supermarket for your own shopping, accept a task in an app, spend half an hour resetting a bay while the agent talks you through it and checks your work from a photo, and get paid before you reach the checkout. That sounds far-fetched until you remember that delivering parcels on your drive home from work sounded far-fetched before Amazon Flex, and now it's completely ordinary."

Baranov said brands and retailers would find this setup attractive because field merchandising is expensive and hard to staff, especially outside of big cities.

On the flip side is Baranov's belief that as more of the judgment moves to the software, merchandising becomes easier to enter, but it may also become harder for people in those roles to build the expertise that traditionally helped them progress into management positions.

"After a thousand hours on the shop floor you know how a specific store behaves, how to work with a store manager, what a promotion looks like when it is going wrong," said Baranov. "When the agent is doing the thinking, that thousand hours accumulates in the model instead...If entry-level roles become highly guided and task-based, the traditional path into more senior merchandising roles may become harder to follow."

Baranov doesn't think retail merchandising career growth will completely disappear, though. "Someone has to supervise the agents, handle the exceptions and tune them for each brand, and those will be good jobs," he said. "There will just be far fewer of them, and the route into them will run through data and technical skills rather than time on the shop floor." In other words, while the industry may see more entry-level roles, it could also experience a shrinkage of junior and senior opportunities.

Okhrimovych, whose company serves major players like Nestlé, Unilever and Bayadera Group, sees CPG brands prioritize one of two goals in this work. The first is to "lower skill requirements for execution [and optimize] day-to-day work," he said. The other goal is to "leverage this free time to move people to higher-value work, so they spend less time taking photos, filling reports and more time building relationships, negotiating, selling ideas."

"Big CPG brands will hire people that can handle human-to-human interaction, people that can turn local learnings into organizational learnings. people with a more commercial mind," he added.

Despite this niche of the market shifting in a way that's potentially more favorable to early career workers, the fact remains that entry-level hiring at the 12 biggest tech companies is down 65 percent since 2019, according to SignalFire's 2026 State of Talent Report. Lean operations and automation may define the structure of modern companies, but human adaptability and intuition remain a defining ingredient in success.