The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Retail Industry in Ukraine in 2025

Ukraine's retail teams need a practical roadmap now more than ever: local chains from Auchan and VARUS to Fozzy are already testing AI - from iBeacon and Midjourney to the Kissa AI food scanner that generates a receipt in 1–2 seconds - so this guide pulls those real-world experiments together and shows how to move from pilots to value.

Read how Ukrainian firms are leveraging AI in the field in Deloitte's report on “How the Ukrainian retail sector leverages artificial intelligence” and why agentic commerce and AI agents matter for streamlined buying journeys (see Mastercard's explainer on agentic commerce).

Practical change hinges on data readiness and fast, measurable pilots, a point underscored by global reviews of retail AI; the next sections translate that advice into step‑by‑step actions, plus local vendor options and skills training - including a hands‑on AI Essentials for Work bootcamp to build workplace-ready AI skills and prompt craft for retail teams (AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration: AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration and details).

“Artificial intelligence is only gaining momentum, but it clearly already is and will be an indispensable assistant in forecasting, prioritizing, model building, and interacting with customers.” - Oksana Zhebchuk, Director of Transformation at Fora

The future of AI in Ukraine's retail sector looks practical, immediate, and steadily ambitious: local chains are already turning experiments - like iBeacon alerts, Midjourney-generated product images, ChatGPT-written descriptions at VARUS, and Fozzy's Kissa AI food scanner that prints a receipt in 1–2 seconds - into testbeds for wider change, and that momentum maps onto global trends such as hyper‑personalization, predictive forecasting and autonomous operations.

Expect the next wave to be less about sci‑fi dazzlers and more about measurable wins - faster checkouts, smarter replenishment and fewer stockouts - enabled by computer vision, demand‑forecasting models and agentic shopping assistants; practical readers can see the broader playbook in Euristiq's rundown of retail AI trends and Deloitte's snapshot of Ukrainian pilots.

Pilots should focus on data readiness, quick ROI tests and anti‑fraud safeguards (self‑checkout systems increasingly use AI to spot anomalies), while omnichannel use cases - from visual search to real‑time pricing and voice invoicing - offer immediate lift for both e‑commerce and stores.

The “so what” is clear: when a tray can be scanned and paid for in two seconds, customer time becomes a competitive asset - start with a high‑impact pilot, measure throughput and scale the wins across stores rather than buying every tool at once (for a deeper look at autonomous stores and payments infrastructure, see Adyen's exploration of autonomous stores).

“Artificial intelligence is only gaining momentum, but it clearly already is and will be an indispensable assistant in forecasting, prioritizing, model building, and interacting with customers.” - Oksana Zhebchuk, Director of Transformation at Fora

In 2025 Ukraine's AI scene feels less like scattered experiments and more like coordinated momentum: government, industry and civil society are building the rules, testbeds and talent pipelines that make productive pilots repeatable.

Kyiv's new AI Committee and the work on a national AI Strategy - partnering with Estonia's Digital Nation and industry backers such as Favbet Tech - are turning strategy into roadmaps for data infrastructure, skills development and international alignment (see the coverage of the Kyiv AI Committee on Complete AI).

At the same time the Ministry of Digital Transformation launched an official AI Gateway and an AI Sandbox so startups and firms can trial solutions in a secure, standards‑aligned environment while the national LLM Diia.AI is already in open beta, signaling faster access to local models and APIs for product teams (details on the government portal).

Civil society and EU‑backed initiatives like AI4Ukraine are pushing ethical, recovery‑focused use and workforce readiness, and OECD tracking underscores the Strategy's emphasis on embedding AI across education, industry and public services.

For retailers in Ukraine, that combination - clearer regulation, sandboxed testing and growing talent - means a safer path from small, measurable pilots to scaled capabilities that cut costs and improve customer experience.

“Our goal is to become one of the top three countries globally in terms of AI development and implementation by 2030. We are already testing our national LLM - Diia.AI - in open beta and working on a national AI strategy. The launch of this platform is a key step in consolidating efforts across sectors.” - Oleksandr Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine

Ukraine's retail trail in 2025 reads like a practical playbook: computer vision and autonomous checkout are already live with Fozzy's Kissa AI - where a tray is scanned and a receipt generated in just 1–2 seconds - while VARUS uses ChatGPT for product descriptions and Midjourney to create product images to replace some photoshoots; in‑store proximity tools such as iBeacon and geofencing (tested by Auchan and shopping‑mall teams) power targeted offers and visitor engagement, and Nova Poshta's voice‑invoice experiments and hackathon work point to conversational and voice assistants for both customers and staff.

Core, high‑impact use cases for Ukrainian retailers therefore include visual search and recommendation engines to raise AOV, AI‑driven inventory forecasting and dynamic pricing to cut stockouts and shrink, and chatbots/virtual knowledge assistants that speed service and free staff for complex tasks - see Deloitte coverage of Ukrainian AI pilots and Publicis Sapient generative AI retail use cases for guidance on which bets to pilot first, plus Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus on visual search and recommender tech for guided discovery.

“Artificial intelligence is only gaining momentum, but it clearly already is and will be an indispensable assistant in forecasting, prioritizing, model building, and interacting with customers.” - Oksana Zhebchuk, Director of Transformation at Fora

Ukraine looks uniquely attractive for retail AI in 2025 because the basics that make pilots scale are already in place: a deep, growing talent pool (reports range from ~285k to 346k+ IT specialists across sources) and steady graduate pipelines - roughly 20,000+ new tech graduates each year - so retail teams can hire or partner quickly with people who know Python, JavaScript, CV and ML toolkits (see N-iX's 2025 tech landscape and Alcor's hiring guide).

Costs remain competitive versus Western markets, letting retailers fund pilots and iterate (regional hourly and salary spreads are detailed by Mobilunity and Index.dev), while five strong tech hubs - Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa - offer both R&D capacity and operational resilience.

Add a maturing startup ecosystem and export-driven services (strong export growth and venture inflows cited across industry reports) and the result is a practical combination of skills, budgets and partners that turns visual search, forecasting models and check‑out automation from boutique experiments into repeatable, deployable systems; in short, Ukraine delivers the people, the price point and the local innovation partners to make retail AI pilots move fast from “demo” to measurable store-level uplift.

Turn AI interest into repeatable retail wins by following a clear, localised roadmap: start with an AI readiness assessment that inventories data quality, infrastructure, skills and governance so leaders know which fixes will unlock pilots (Ukrainian consumers value timesaving, comfort and accessibility but remain cautious about robots - only 36.9% said they'd work with a robot, so change management matters; see the Ukrainian Ukrainian AI awareness and readiness survey (Business Perspectives)).

Use a phased playbook - assess, set strategy, pick 1–2 high-impact, low-complexity pilots (visual search, demand forecasting or checkout automation), run short agile sprints with tight success metrics, then scale proven pilots across regions with standardized MLOps and governance - a 6‑phase framework shows this approach reduces costly false starts and drives higher ROI (Six-phase AI roadmap framework (Reimagineering)).

Pair internal upskilling with practical vendor partnerships and monitor adoption continuously (an ongoing AI readiness score keeps the plan honest); practical pilots plus visible staff training win trust fast, turning a single store pilot into a network advantage rather than a one-off demo (for practical readiness checklists and assessment tools, see WiserBrand's readiness guidance).

Salespeople in Ukraine can turn everyday tasks into measurable wins by using AI to find better leads, personalize outreach and speed closing: start with lead‑gen and enrichment tools (examples include GetProspect and Snov.io) to build targeted lists and feed them into predictive lead‑scoring models that surface hot opportunities, use AI social‑listening like YouScan to spot local demand signals and competitor moves, and automate routine responses with chatbots or AI copilots so human sellers focus on higher‑value conversations - Conservative pilots work best, so run short experiments with clear KPIs (response time, conversion rate, pipeline velocity) and scale winners.

For content and creative touchpoints, generative tools that VARUS uses (ChatGPT for descriptions, Midjourney for images) cut content time and keep product pages fresh, while pricing and recommendation engines (see Competera and other Ukrainian SaaS leaders) enable smarter, dynamic offers that improve close rates.

Treat a pilot like a tiny store experiment - measure throughput the way Kissa AI measures checkout time (receipt in 1–2 seconds) - and iterate: faster responses, sharper targeting and a few well‑chosen AI tools can raise efficiency by the benchmarks marketers report and free sales teams to sell more effectively (see practical AI use cases for marketing and top Ukrainian AI SaaS for vendor ideas).

“Artificial intelligence is only gaining momentum, but it clearly already is and will be an indispensable assistant in forecasting, prioritizing, model building, and interacting with customers.” - Oksana Zhebchuk, Director of Transformation at Fora

For Ukrainian retailers building practical, store‑level AI, the clearest pattern is a hybrid stack that places latency‑sensitive workloads at the edge while keeping heavy training, model management and long‑term storage in the cloud - a design that protects customer data, cuts bandwidth costs and keeps services “always on” in stores and distribution hubs.

At the device and edge layer, Intel's modular Edge Platform and OpenVINO runtime simplify deploying computer‑vision and checkout inference on existing hardware, enabling zero‑touch provisioning and the kind of near‑instant throughput that powers frictionless checkout and real‑time inventory alerts (Intel Edge Platform).

For orchestration and multicloud control, Mirantis' k0rdent AI offers Kubernetes‑native, policy‑driven cluster management that helps teams run GPU clusters and inference across on‑prem, cloud and edge without vendor lock‑in (Mirantis k0rdent AI).

Meanwhile, Nutanix and similar AI‑ready infrastructure solutions provide turnkey options for “GPT‑in‑a‑Box” and secure GenAI endpoints when private LLMs or fast inference are required (Nutanix AI‑ready infrastructure).

The practical takeaway: match low‑latency CV and checkout services to edge platforms, centralize model training and governance in hybrid clusters, and choose vendors that support open standards so pilot wins can scale across Ukraine's diverse store footprint - imagine a single oil‑stained checkout camera triggering a training pipeline overnight, then rolling an updated model to hundreds of stores by morning.

“The edge is the next frontier of digital transformation, being further fueled by AI. We are building on our strong customer base in the market and consolidating our years of software initiatives to the next level in delivering a complete edge‑native platform, which is needed to enable infrastructure, applications and efficient AI deployments at scale.” - Pallavi Mahajan, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Network and Edge Group Software

Securing pilots and scaling AI across Ukrainian retail depends on savvy funding, pragmatic hiring and tightened procurement with clear anti‑fraud guardrails: the EU's Ukraine Facility provides a predictable backbone - up to €50 billion for 2024–2027 including concessional loans and grants and a dedicated Investment Fund - while fresh EIB/Commission packages (nearly €600 million for infrastructure and SME support) and EU‑backed guarantees are already channeling liquidity to banks that lend to firms, making vendor financing and working‑capital loans easier to access for retail chains and local SaaS partners; see the European Commission Ukraine recovery and reconstruction overview and the EIB Group July 2025 financing note for details.

On talent and hiring, the Facility pairs finance with reforms and technical assistance to strengthen public financial management, vocational education and transparent procurement so retailers can recruit or partner reliably.

Risk mitigation should lean on EU de‑risking instruments, lender guarantees and strengthened oversight (EIB cooperation with Ukraine's audit agencies), plus staged procurement (small pilot contracts, clear KPIs, escrowed payments) to limit exposure while learning fast - practical moves that let a retailer bridge a warehouse or POS upgrade without overcommitting capital.

“Ukraine can count on the EU's full support. We stand ready to take a leading role in the international reconstruction efforts to help rebuild a democratic and prosperous Ukraine. This means investments will go hand in hand with reforms that will support Ukraine in pursuing its European path.” - Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

For Ukrainian retailers ready to turn experimentation into durable advantage, next steps are straightforward and local: run a fast readiness audit, pick one high‑impact pilot (visual search, demand forecasting or checkout automation), and use the WINWIN AI Center of Excellence sandbox to test in a controlled environment while preserving data sovereignty (WINWIN AI Center of Excellence sandbox (Digital State Ukraine)); parallel to pilots, map legal risk and align product design with Ukraine's regulatory roadmap and EU obligations using the national AI strategy and HUDERIA impact checks so future EU market access is not an afterthought (AI regulation in Ukraine: national strategy and compliance framework).

Invest in people - short, practical upskilling closes adoption gaps fast, for example via a hands‑on AI Essentials for Work bootcamp that teaches prompt craft and applied AI for business roles (AI Essentials for Work bootcamp registration (Nucamp)).

Treat each pilot like a store experiment - measure throughput, user trust and fraud signals, then scale the winners; this staged, governance‑first approach turns rapid demos into reliable, compliant productivity gains across Ukraine's retail network.

“We intend to cultivate a culture of self-regulation among businesses through various means, including the voluntary adoption of ethical codes of conduct by companies. Additionally, we will provide businesses with a White Paper outlining the approach, timeline, and stages of regulatory implementation,” said Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov.