University of Arizona’s Lundgren Retail Collaborative Awards Research Grants to Advance AI-Driven Retail Innovation
Funded projects explore AI’s potential to deepen personalization, build trust, and reshape customer experiences in retail
The Lundgren Retail Collaborative is proud to announce the recipients of its 2025 Lundgren Collaborative Grant Awards. These competitive grants support retail-related academic research that explores emerging opportunities at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and the retail industry.
“By providing seed funding for these visionary research projects, the Lundgren Retail Collaborative is accelerating practical insights retailers can use to deepen personalization, strengthen trust, and improve the customer experience in the age of AI,” said Terry J. Lundgren, CEO Chairman, CEO Macy*s, Inc., Retired. “I believe this work is essential for the future of retail. We’re moving beyond headlines to applied research, leading the way on AI and retail through academic and industry partnerships.”
“This year’s selected projects demonstrate the transformative potential of AI across every facet of retail,” said Jennifer Savary, co-director of the Lundgren Retail Collaborative. “By bringing together consumer science, artificial intelligence, and real-world retail challenges, these researchers are building the kinds of insights that will shape how we shop, sell, and experience retail in the future.”
The 2025 research grant awards reflect a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches from across the University of Arizona including projects from the College of Engineering, Norton School of Human Ecology, and four units within the Eller College of Management: Department of Management Information Systems, Department of Management and Organizations, Department of Marketing, and McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.
“From customer engagement and loyalty programs to marketing and personalization, this year’s grant recipients are tackling exciting questions facing retailers at this time of rapid change,” added fellow co-director Lance Ericson. “We’re excited and proud to support faculty whose work will not only contribute to academic thought leadership but also generate insights that matter to retail leaders.”
The 2025 grant recipients and their projects include:
Robert Gabriel Grateron
Mapping Retail Potential: Using AI and Tapestry Segmentation to Uncover Customer Personas and Predict Growth Markets for E-Commerce Brands
This research proposes a novel framework for mapping and understanding e-commerce consumer behavior through spatial analysis and AI.
AI, The Trust Doctor
Popular belief holds that generative AI cannot match humans’ interpersonal skills in navigating complex social interactions. This project challenges that assumption by investigating AI’s capacity for trust repair, a context in which interpersonal skills are essential for taking the counterpart’s perspective and alleviating relational strain.
Sydni Do and Martin Reimann
Gender Stereotypes and Financial Decision-Making in Retail: The Role of AI
Building upon our previous research funded by the Lundgren Retail Center, this project will empirically test the influence of gender stereotypes on how consumers make financial decisions in a retail context, including whether they adopt the use of AI financial assistants.
Anastasiya Ghosh and Pureum Kim
Consumer Political Ideology and the Second-Hand Retail Market
This research project to explore how differences in political ideology drive consumers’ willingness to purchase secondhand items from different retailers.
Ehsan Azimi and Huanrui Yang
AI-Powered Embodied Avatars in XR for Enhancing Consumer Engagement and Decision-Making in Retail Environments
This project proposes the development and evaluation of AI-powered embodied avatars in extended reality (XR) environments to enhance consumer engagement and decision-making in retail contexts.
Kathleen J. Kennedy
Privacy-Personalization Paradox and Parasocial Relationships in AI-Mediated Retailing
The privacy-personalization paradox--where consumers voice privacy concerns yet still share personal data for customized experiences--remains one of digital commerce’s most enduring puzzles. This study will explore the gap between what consumers say and what they do for effective and ethical retail implementation.
Agrim Sachdeva and Alfred Benedikt Brendel
Human Roles in Multi-Agent AI Teams for Ad Copy Creation
Recent advances in generative AI allow organizations to design dynamic multi-agent teams that can include both human and AI members. This project explores the role of humans as either active team members or supervisors within multiagent human-AI teams tasked with generating retail ad copy.
Real-Time Churn Prediction Using Fine-Grained User Behavior Data for Enhanced Retail Strategies
Customer retention is an important retail performance driver. This study aims to develop a framework that detects mobile user churn within the first minutes of app usage, thus enabling retailers to tailor marketing interventions or advertising strategies in real time.
The 2025 grant cohort reflects the Collaborative’s ongoing commitment to supporting research that not only advances academic knowledge, but also provides meaningful, real-world insights for a rapidly evolving retail industry. As generative AI continues to reshape consumer experiences and business models, the Lundgren Retail Collaborative connects the retail industry with cutting-edge academic research.