Füsun Özdemir urges investing in people as much as tech, how should a team prepare for AI?

The conversation runs as a video interview on Perakende.org under the Vizyon 100 tag. The page does not explain what the series covers. It gives no founding year or sector detail for FSN Danışmanlık & Akademi.

In Özdemir’s words, the future will be shaped by companies that invest “in people’s development as much as in technology” (our translation). The weight of the sentence sits in “as much as”. It does not push technology aside; it adds a second line next to it.

Because the page reports no measured result. Test the question against your own numbers: staff turnover, how fast a new hire gets up to speed and the error count at the till.

Füsun Özdemir, Perakende.org, 13 October 2026. The second column shows her view; the third shows whether the page reports a measured result. This is not investment advice.

The jobs with direct customer contact: the till, the returns desk, the order line and the shop-floor help point. When an AI suggestion turns out wrong, the employee still makes the final call. We look at the balance between technology and people at the till in our piece on self-checkout versus staffed tills.

Next to the software licence, add lines for training hours, a trial period and one named owner. The desk’s recommendation is to keep these as separate items. Otherwise training is the first line cut when money gets tight.

The survey covers 23,532 adults in 32 countries, interviewed between 20 March and 3 April 2026. The Türkiye sample is 500 people aged 18 to 74, and the results came out on 8 July 2026. It describes the adult population, not employees.

The 45% figure describes the general population, but it can surface in a store too. When a new system arrives and nobody answers the question “is this replacing me?”, staff find reasons not to use it. Özdemir’s people-centred focus lands right here.

Novelty alone is not enough. What wins an employee over is a tool that makes their day easier in concrete ways: fewer stock-count errors, faster order entry, fewer repeated customer questions.

Search engines and marketplaces recognise your product from the data you enter. If SKU codes, sizes, colours and stock levels are messy, AI multiplies the mess. A single owner for product data comes before any training.

Map-listing hours, review replies and store photos can be managed with automated tools. The tool can write the reply, but the team fixes the complaint in the store. Answer a review without solving the problem, and the customer walks back out the door.

Automated bidding and targeting spend money on the wrong audience when tracking is set up badly. At least one person on the team needs to read conversion tracking, average basket value and campaign return.

Grocery, café and store chains that add training and leadership lines to the technology budget can bed a tool in faster. Once the team adopts it, look for movement in sales per employee and sales per square metre.

Clothing and shoe stores find it hard to make time to teach new staff the system in peak season. Training gets postponed and the season closes before anyone uses the tool.

The focus on leadership also raises the question of who digital change should report to. Our take on Çilek’s appointment of a technology group head opens a different window on this.

Write every piece of software used at the till, in the stockroom, on social media and in customer service into one table. On each row, add who uses it and when they were last trained. The empty cells show your priorities.

Ask staff two questions: where does the tool make your work easier, and where does it slow you down? The answers are the raw material for needs-based training.

Not necessarily a large one. What you really need is time set aside for training and one person who owns the tool.

No. The interview text on Perakende.org names no software, programme or company example, and the views are general in nature.

Write down clearly which tasks the tool will take on and which tasks your staff will spend their time on instead. According to the Ipsos AI Monitor 2026, 45% of people in Türkiye share this worry, and staying silent does not reduce it.