As 2026 nears, businesses face fragmented data, stricter compliance, and rising customer expectations. Discover how Akeneo PIM centralizes product information, improves data quality, and streamlines workflows to ensure compliance, sustainability, and agility in a changing market.
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The year 2026 is shaping up to be a turning point for global commerce. The rise of AI-powered experiences and rapidly evolving customer expectations are transforming how businesses operate and compete. Our survey found that two-fifths of consumers would pay about 25% more for a personalized or tailored shopping experience, showing just how important data-led interactions have become.
At the same time, new sustainability and compliance regulations — including the Digital Product Passport (DPP) initiative in Europe — are raising the bar for transparency and traceability. Customers now expect consistent, reliable product experiences across every touchpoint, while organizations must manage complex data ecosystems, coordinate with suppliers, and stay agile in the face of growing regulatory demands.
In this fast-changing environment, Product Information Management (PIM) can act as the foundation for digital transformation, empowering businesses to manage and activate product information with greater efficiency and control. By allowing teams to align around a single source of truth and by streamlining how data flows across the organization, a modern PIM built on an API-first architecture enables smooth data exchange, faster integrations, and the flexibility to scale as your business grows.
As we move toward 2026, let’s look at the biggest challenges businesses will face — and how PIM can help solve them!
To stay competitive in 2026 and beyond, businesses must overcome several critical data and operational challenges. Here’s how PIM plays a key role in tackling them:
Disorganized and scattered product data remains one of the biggest barriers to business growth. Many organizations still rely on disconnected systems, from ERPs and spreadsheets to eCommerce platforms and DAMs, which leads to duplication and wasted time. These silos make it nearly impossible to deliver accurate and consistent product information across channels, hurting customer trust and operational efficiency. As regulatory and consumer expectations for data accuracy continue to rise, fragmented product information poses an increasingly costly risk.
PIM solves this by serving as a central hub for all product information, a single source of truth that unifies data from multiple systems. It provides a structured, governed environment where teams can enrich, validate, and distribute consistent product data across all channels. By ensuring that every stakeholder works from the same reliable foundation, businesses can eliminate redundancy and improve data accuracy well into 2026 and beyond.
AI-driven commerce is on the rise; in fact, SEMrush predicts that AI-powered search experiences will become the preference over traditional search methods by 2028. But here’s the secret: AI relies heavily on clean and enriched product data. Without it, recommendation engines, chatbots, and search algorithms deliver poor results, leading to missed opportunities and frustrated customers. Many organizations still struggle to prepare their data for these advanced use cases, limiting their ability to deliver personalized and predictive experiences.
PIM provides the data foundation needed for effective AI implementation. By ensuring product data is complete and standardized, PIM allows AI tools to perform at their best. This leads to more relevant search results, smarter recommendations, and improved automated content generation. With a reliable source of structured product information, businesses can confidently adopt AI technologies that enhance customer experience and operational efficiency.
Manual workflows, disconnected tools, and repeated data entry often slow down product launches, costing businesses valuable time in competitive markets. When teams across departments and regions work from different data sources, even minor updates require days or weeks of coordination. These inefficiencies not only delay launches but also limit the ability to respond quickly to changing market trends and consumer demands.
With PIM solutions, businesses can accelerate product launches through streamlined workflows, automation, and centralized collaboration. Teams can enrich data and approve changes within one unified platform, streamlining the journey from concept to launch. By improving visibility and eliminating duplicate work, PIM helps brands bring products to market faster — whether launching new lines or updating existing assortments.
Akeneo PIM takes this even further with tools designed to make the entire product launch process more intelligent and efficient. Its industry-centric product family templates simplify catalog modeling by preselecting the most relevant attributes for specific industries. Teams can automate repetitive tasks, from populating shared attributes and transforming data upon import to updating categories in bulk. The platform also pinpoints missing information and ensures that every product meets completeness and compliance standards before launch. With these capabilities, Akeneo PIM allows teams to focus on what matters most: enriching product data to create compelling experiences that drive conversions. It also helps businesses achieve a more scalable time-to-market.
As regulations like the Digital Product Passport (DPP) fully come into effect in 2026, businesses must prepare to manage both detailed and transparent product data. Customers and regulators alike expect visibility into sourcing, materials, recyclability, and carbon footprint. Essentially, all the information that is often scattered and difficult to maintain. Without a unified system, brands face compliance risks and reputational challenges.
A PIM solution centralizes and structures all product data in one place, making it easier to collect information from suppliers, enrich it with sustainability attributes, and standardize formats for compliance. Teams can capture critical environmental and social metrics with accuracy and confidence. By consolidating data into a single source of truth, businesses improve visibility across their supply chain and create a clearer product record that’s ready for DPP reporting.
With Akeneo PIM, businesses gain a future-proof foundation for sustainability and compliance management. It enables collaboration between marketing, product, and sustainability teams, ensuring everyone contributes to the same structured dataset. As regulations evolve, Akeneo PIM adapts. It allows brands to integrate with new DPP interfaces and scale across markets with ease. By providing a centralized structure for sustainability data, Akeneo PIM simplifies compliance and strengthens brand trust. It positions businesses as transparent, responsible leaders in the evolving landscape of 2026 and beyond!
A consistent and engaging product experience is now the expected standard for shoppers across every channel, from brand websites to online marketplaces. However, each channel comes with its own data structures, format requirements, and content rules, making it increasingly difficult for teams to manage product information manually. These challenges often lead to inconsistencies and inaccuracies that undermine brand trust and compromise the customer experience.
PIM simplifies this by enabling businesses to standardize and adapt information for every channel efficiently. Teams can easily update media and descriptions while maintaining a consistent brand voice and product story across regions and platforms. This streamlined approach ensures that every channel reflects accurate product content.
Beyond PIM, Akeneo Activation takes multichannel management even further by helping brands publish enriched product data directly to leading retailer and marketplace sites. Once a channel is enabled, required and optional attributes become visible within Akeneo, allowing teams to map existing PIM data to each destination’s specific requirements. Operations can also be configured to automatically transform PIM data to match each channel’s standards, eliminating repetitive manual work. This tight integration between Akeneo PIM and Akeneo Activation creates a powerful feedback loop, ensuring accurate data distribution and scalable automation across every digital touchpoint. The result is a cohesive, high-performing omnichannel experience that drives conversions and customer loyalty!
Incomplete or inaccurate product data not only disrupts internal processes but also damages customer confidence. Inconsistent product naming and outdated content can lead to poor search performance, higher return rates, and (as you guessed it) lost sales. Without clear governance, maintaining data accuracy becomes increasingly difficult as product catalogs grow and evolve.
PIM provides built-in quality controls that ensure every product meets defined completeness and validation rules before publication. Its governance framework gives businesses visibility into data readiness and establishes accountability across teams. By maintaining high standards of product data quality, organizations can improve the customer experience and ensure long-term consistency as they scale globally.
Entering new markets requires accurate, culturally relevant, and compliant product information — a process that quickly becomes overwhelming without the right systems. Teams must manage multiple languages, currencies, measurement systems, and regional regulations, often juggling spreadsheets and manual translations. These inefficiencies not only slow expansion but also risk introducing inaccuracies that harm credibility with local consumers.
PIM simplifies global expansion by enabling businesses to manage multilingual and regional data in one centralized platform. Teams can easily localize content for each market while keeping it aligned with the central source of truth in PIM. The system’s flexible data model supports region-specific attributes, legal requirements, and brand messaging, empowering organizations to expand confidently into new markets while maintaining efficiency and brand integrity.
Supplier data often arrives in multiple formats, varying levels of completeness, and inconsistent quality, forcing teams to spend countless hours cleaning and validating information. These errors create friction that delay product onboarding and disrupt the flow of accurate information throughout the organization.
PIM addresses this challenge by offering a structured environment where supplier data can be imported, validated, and enriched efficiently. It ensures that all information entering the system meets the organization’s data standards and can be seamlessly published to downstream channels.
To take this even further, Akeneo Supplier Data Manager (SDM) works hand in hand with Akeneo PIM, enabling suppliers to upload, correct, and enrich product data directly through a standardized interface. This collaboration centralizes supplier data collection and ensures consistency at the source by flagging errors in real time for immediate correction. By reducing manual intervention and streamlining product data normalization, businesses can onboard products faster and more accurately! This leads to a more efficient ecosystem where suppliers and internal teams work together to maintain high-quality, market-ready product data, all within Akeneo Product Cloud or as a standalone solution.
When teams rely on spreadsheets and manual updates, collaboration becomes slow and error-prone. Marketing, product, and eCommerce departments often work in isolation, duplicating efforts and losing visibility into the product data lifecycle. These silos lead to delays and miscommunication, which lead to missed opportunities to improve product experiences!
However, PIM eliminates silos by providing a shared workspace where teams can collaborate in real time. It guides teams through the enrichment process with defined roles, structured workflows, and task assignments, ensuring everyone knows their responsibilities and works toward shared goals. This not only streamlines processes and enhances productivity but also improves data consistency across departments, creating an aligned way of working.
Akeneo Shared Catalogs takes collaboration a step further by simplifying product data sharing and communication across teams and partners. Through a secure online product portal, sales and service teams, distributors, and retailers can access up-to-date and customized digital catalogs on demand — all synchronized automatically with Akeneo PIM. By enabling internal and external teams with real-time access to accurate product information, businesses can reduce time spent searching for data, bring products to market faster, and deliver richer customer experiences.
Many businesses publish product information without truly understanding how it performs across channels. Without visibility into content engagement or conversion impact, teams struggle to improve product storytelling and optimize data for customer needs.
PIM establishes the foundation for performance insight by ensuring high-quality product data across every channel. It allows teams to monitor completeness and ensure accuracy before publication.
When combined with Akeneo PX Insights and Akeneo Business Analytics, businesses gain a complete view of how product content drives engagement, conversions, and overall performance. PX Insights transforms customer behavior signals into actionable insights directly within Akeneo PIM. These insights help businesses refine content based on real customer interactions and boost visibility across channels. Meanwhile, Akeneo Business Analytics, built into Akeneo PIM, tracks key metrics such as sales, page views, and conversion rates to evaluate enrichment effectiveness and identify opportunities for optimization. Together, these tools provide the visibility needed to continuously refine product experiences and drive sustained omnichannel growth.
As 2026 approaches, the ability to manage, trust, and activate product data will define which businesses thrive in the evolving digital landscape. Customer expectations and the rise of AI are transforming how brands must operate, and product information sits at the center of it all.
With Akeneo PIM and the broader Akeneo Product Cloud, organizations can build a single, scalable foundation for product data excellence. By breaking down silos, improving data quality, and unlocking insights across every channel, businesses can stay agile and customer-focused — ready to lead the next era of commerce with confidence.
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