Retail Industry Is Leading the Way in MACH Adoption: Study
Almost 38% of retail organizations have been using microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless (MACH) technology for more than seven years, according to the MACH Alliance’s 2025 Global Annual Research.
The MACH Alliance is a not-for-profit industry association that provides standards, certification, and education for companies that want to use composable commerce technologies enabled by MACH architecture (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless).
The group surveyed over 560 IT leaders who work in organizations with at least 5,000 employees and $500 million in annual revenue. Ninety-one percent of organizations have increased their MACH infrastructure in the past year, with retailers leading the pack. Adaptation is expected to continue to increase, with surveyed organizations predicting they’ll be using MACH for 61% of their technology stack by 2026.
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Older CPG companies have been slower to adopt the technology because they are concerned about the disruption to their business processes, where large teams must work together to ensure smooth operations through managing inventory, analyzing sales, and predicting demand. MACH Alliance managing director Holly Hall says the first step to making institutional changes is building confidence in the new technology’s ability to remove the constraints of dated solutions.
“It’s important to understand that adopting a composable approach can be incremental,” Hall tells CGT. “Companies can implement a crawl, walk, run approach, implementing MACH technology in strategic parts of their tech stack while still leveraging their legacy systems in others, and slowly transforming over time.”
MACH Adoption Response
Most of the respondents to MACH Alliance’s survey (87%) reported they felt confident implementing MACH at their organization. Those who make the transition see clear benefits, with 94% reporting that the ROI from MACH has met or exceeded their expectations and 79% of adopters seeing themselves as ahead of the competition. That rises to 91% for companies that are further along in their implementation.
MACH adoption supports efficiency and adaptability, according to Hall, as well as helps brands weather economic volatility.
Improved customer experience is the top MACH benefit, according to 55% of respondents, followed closely by enhanced process integration and an improved ability to respond to market fluctuations. Economic uncertainty was cited as a reason for adoption by 77% of respondents.
The study found that MACH use strongly correlates to AI adoption, with AI embraced by 77% of organizations that are MACH veterans compared to 36% of those just trying MACH. Using the technologies together can unlock new efficiencies for CPG companies.
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“When a company can streamline its technology infrastructure so that solutions are communicating with one another and allowing business users to view data and insights in real time, it unlocks the ability to personalize the customer experience,” Hall said. “Once the MACH infrastructure is in place, and data is integrated and unified, CPGs can pull together loyalty data, sales data, panel data, and more and let AI personalize the results.”
Beyond providing personalized recommendations to customers, the integration between MACH and AI can improve demand forecasting and inventory management.
“The innovations come from the MACH infrastructure’s ability to be flexible and open to incorporating different vendors and solutions that best fit that brand’s business needs,” Hall said.
