AI
Czech Retail's AI Pivot: Inside the Warehouses and Routing Algorithms Powering Rohlik and Its Rivals
Prague — Czech retail rarely gets discussed alongside banking or manufacturing in the national AI-adoption conversation, but the sector has arguably produced the country's most commercially proven AI use case: same-day grocery delivery, an operational problem that simply does not work economically without heavy algorithmic optimisation underneath it.
By Vanek · Contributor · Independent Journalist · Published
Vanek is an independent contributor to the Czech Business Review; his views and sourcing are his own.
Rohlik Group, the Prague-founded e-grocery operator that became one of Czechia's two unicorns after a 2021 Series C round, has built its entire growth model around a logistics problem that is fundamentally a forecasting and routing problem: predicting demand precisely enough to stock the right products in the right micro-fulfilment centres, then routing delivery slots efficiently enough to make same-day and next-hour delivery profitable at scale rather than a loss-leading novelty. That operational core is precisely why Tomáš Čupr, Rohlik's founder, chose it as the launchpad for his next company: Duvo AI, an AI-native automation platform for retail operations that closed a $15m seed round built explicitly on the premise that the fragmented legacy systems underneath most retail operations — inventory, pricing, logistics, customer service — can be replaced with AI-native tooling rather than patched together, without requiring retailers to rip out their entire technology stack at once. Our unicorns and scale-ups piece carries the fuller account of both companies' funding histories.
Where the AI actually sits
Industry analysis of Czech and CEE retail consistently identifies three areas where AI has moved furthest from pilot to production: demand forecasting and inventory management, where prediction accuracy directly determines waste and stockout rates in a category — fresh grocery — with famously thin margins for error; dynamic pricing and personalisation, where AI-driven recommendation and pricing engines are used to protect margin without visibly alienating price-sensitive shoppers; and logistics-and-routing optimisation, the layer that determines whether same-day delivery promises are operationally sustainable or a cash-burning marketing claim. Alza, the Czech e-commerce group that predates the current AI wave by well over a decade, has similarly built increasingly automated fulfilment and customer-service operations, reflecting a broader pattern across established Czech retailers of layering AI onto existing logistics infrastructure rather than building AI-native operations from scratch, in contrast to newer entrants like Duvo AI.
The adoption pattern mirrors the national picture
Retail's AI story broadly tracks the size-driven adoption pattern documented across the wider Czech economy: national data shows 41 per cent of large Czech firms using AI in some form against roughly 11 per cent of companies overall, and retail is no exception to that divide. Large, well-capitalised operators — Rohlik, Alza, and the Czech operations of international grocery chains including Kaufland — have the transaction volume, delivery density and balance-sheet depth to justify building or buying sophisticated forecasting and routing systems. Smaller independent retailers and regional chains, by contrast, are far more likely to be limited to off-the-shelf point-of-sale analytics or basic recommendation plug-ins, if they have adopted AI tooling at all — a gap that mirrors the broader SME adoption lag documented across Czech manufacturing and services.
The margin logic driving urgency
What distinguishes retail's AI adoption from sectors adopting more cautiously is the directness of the margin case. Grocery and general e-commerce operate on thin single-digit margins where even small improvements in forecast accuracy or delivery-route efficiency translate into outsized profitability gains — a much more legible return-on-investment case for a finance department to approve than the harder-to-quantify productivity claims that slow AI adoption in professional services or manufacturing. That legibility is likely one reason the sector has moved as fast as it has, even without the kind of dedicated national policy attention that manufacturing and public administration have received under the government's AI strategy.
What comes next
The open question for Czech retail through the rest of 2026 is less whether AI adoption continues — the economics make that close to inevitable for any operator competing on delivery speed or price — and more whether the sector's current AI-native challengers, Duvo AI among them, can convert operational software built for one company's problem into a genuinely exportable product for the wider CEE retail market, the same transition that Rohlik itself made from a single-market grocery operator into a multi-country logistics platform.