By Vishwesh Iyer
SINGAPORE, June 16, 2025 – As Asia Pacific’s retail sector navigates rapid technological shifts and changing consumer behaviours, companies are being challenged to rethink not just how they engage customers, but how they operate internally. In a wide-ranging conversation with AsiaBizToday.com, Gavin Watson, Go-To-Market Lead for APJ Retail & Manufacturing at monday.com, shared how technology, AI, and smarter workflows are helping retailers across the region manage complexity, unlock efficiencies, and stay competitive.
The Growing Relevance of NRF in Asia
Reflecting on NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show Asia Pacific, Watson underscored how the event’s increasing focus on Asia reflects the region’s growing importance in global retail. “The quality and diversity of participants this year were particularly strong,” he observed. “It’s become a very strategic platform for us to engage with both existing and potential partners in the region.”
For monday.com, a work management platform that now spans CRM, service management, development workflows, and more, such gatherings are an opportunity to reinforce brand presence and explore Asia’s dynamic growth markets.
Where the Back End Lags Behind
Even as the region’s retail sector embraces digital-first customer experiences, Watson pointed out that many businesses remain burdened by inefficient back-end operations.
“Consumers are engaging through digital-first channels, but much of the backend still relies on spreadsheets and fragmented communications,” he said. This operational lag creates a disconnect that directly affects speed to market, campaign execution, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.
monday.com steps in to bridge this gap. By replacing outdated manual processes with integrated workflows and automation, retailers can align back-end operations with the agility demanded by today’s fast-moving front-end channels.
Watson shared how global brands have leveraged monday.com to streamline their internal processes. McDonald’s ANZ, for example, dramatically reduced email overload and communication gaps by shifting campaign coordination onto monday.com’s platform. “Thousands of disjointed emails were replaced with structured workflows, creating an auditable, transparent system that significantly reduced operational risk,” Watson explained.
Officeworks, a major office supplies retailer in Australia, faced an equally daunting challenge: coordinating complex range planning across hundreds of spreadsheets and tens of thousands of emails. With monday.com, Officeworks automated much of this process, not only reducing errors and duplication but allowing the company to be far more responsive in revenue-impacting decisions.
“Retailers are starting to realise that real efficiencies, and real margin gains, come from fixing what happens behind the scenes, not just polishing the storefront,” he added.
AI: The New Operational Brain
AI is now central to monday.com’s approach, not just for process automation but for surfacing risks early and enabling faster, better-informed decisions.
“AI can now analyse project timelines, highlight tasks that are off-track, and quantify the potential revenue impact of delays,” Watson explained. This is particularly critical in capital-intensive initiatives like store openings, where any slippage in deadlines can erode returns.
Beyond project management, monday.com also uses AI to streamline procurement and HR processes. By automatically parsing thousands of job applications or supplier bids and filtering for relevant candidates or offers, the platform eliminates hours of manual screening.
On the customer-facing side, AI is enabling retailers to deliver highly personalised shopping experiences. Shoppers can now enter their body dimensions on fashion websites, receive curated product recommendations, and preview clothing on models matching their body type, all powered by AI.
“The result is fewer returns, better experiences, and stronger customer satisfaction,” Watson noted.
Watson also described how AI is helping retailers identify entirely new product categories by analysing consumer data across social platforms. Cosmetics companies, for instance, are using AI to monitor emerging trends on TikTok, Meta, and other platforms, helping them quickly identify gaps and bring new products to market.
“This two-way feedback loop between retailers and suppliers is driving faster product innovation and even giving rise to more private-label offerings,” he explained.
Marketplaces and Circular Fashion: Two Growing Trends
As retail ecosystems evolve, Watson sees two trends reshaping the competitive landscape: the rise of marketplace models and the growing influence of the circular economy.
“Many retailers are wrapping marketplace infrastructures around their existing businesses. This allows them to onboard suppliers quickly, introduce new categories, and even test second-hand or recommerce models with minimal disruption to core operations,” he said.
Gen Z consumers, in particular, are driving demand for vintage and second-hand products, turning sustainability into both a lifestyle choice and a fashion statement. “Even my teenage kids refuse to buy new clothes. For them, second-hand is cooler and more responsible,” Watson added.
With many retailers consolidating store footprints, monday.com is also helping companies better manage store rollouts, closures, and transformations. Increasingly, underperforming locations are being repurposed into micro-distribution hubs or ‘dark stores’ to support last-mile delivery.
“If closing a store is too costly, retailers are now asking whether those locations can serve as localised fulfilment hubs to speed up deliveries and improve customer satisfaction,” Watson explained.
Retail Media: The New Margin Driver
Another fast-growing opportunity Watson identified is retail media — the practice of monetising retailer-owned media space across stores, apps, and websites.
“The reason is simple: while product sales might deliver 6–7% margins, retail media offers up to 80%,” Watson noted. Yet as more retailers enter the retail media space, competition for brand advertising budgets will intensify, forcing retailers to demonstrate differentiated value to secure spending.
Balancing Speed and Sustainability
Looking ahead, Watson predicts that retailers will need to carefully balance fast fashion cycles driven by AI-powered trend detection with growing consumer expectations for sustainability.
“AI enables rapid product launches, sometimes for just one season or even a single promotional event. But at the same time, circular models and recommerce are becoming essential to meet consumer expectations around sustainability,” he said.
Retailers that master both, offering agility without sacrificing responsibility, are likely to emerge as long-term winners.
As monday.com continues to embed itself deeper into retailers’ operational frameworks, its ability to enable smarter, faster, and more resilient operations is becoming increasingly central to Asia Pacific’s retail transformation.
“At the end of the day, whether it’s new marketplaces, personalised offers, AI-driven category creation, or efficient store operations, it all comes down to execution. And that’s where we help,” Watson concluded.