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Multinational retail group Amer Sports spent the last few years revamping its technology backbone, upgrading key systems that support operations. In 2026, the company plans to boost its IT investments with an eye toward embedding AI and amplifying its employees’ strengths.

The Helsinki, Finland-based company, which operates outdoor and sports brands such as Salomon, Arc’teryx and Wilson, expects its capital expenditures to reach $400 million in 2026, up from $310 million in 2025. The increase is driven in part by strategic investments in IT infrastructure, according to a February Q4 2025 earnings call.

The company’s key IT investments are concentrated in enterprise systems modernization, digital commerce infrastructure and data and planning capability, Donghai Chen, chief digital officer at Amer Sports, told CIO Dive in an email.

AI is a significant part of the company’s infrastructure investments, with an active AI program operating in parallel with the company’s core systems. Chen said he frames the relationship between infrastructure and AI investments as “deliberately complementary.”

“Core platforms and systems establish the foundation that enables AI to be applied meaningfully at scale,” he said. “AI initiatives, in turn, accelerate and amplify the value created by those foundational investments. The two reinforce each other, and the sequencing matters. When AI is introduced without sufficient foundational capabilities in place, the impact tends to remain localized and experimental rather than translating into sustained productivity gains.”

Amer Sports is in the process of migrating its finance, supply chain and HR business platforms onto a modernized, cloud-based infrastructure.

The centerpiece of the company’s enterprise systems modernization is its SAP S/4HANA program, which Chen said will “serve as the operational backbone across our brands and geographies.” Amer Sports began its RISE with SAP journey in May 2025 to speed the company’s digital transformation, according to a press release.

The company is also in the first phase of deployment of a human resources information system implementation to modernize HR data and processes across the group’s brands, Chen said.

Digital commerce infrastructure is another critical piece of the group’s IT investments, with brands at different points in the transition from wholesale-oriented technology stacks to purpose-built, direct-to-consumer architectures, Chen said.

“Building the commerce, data and supply chain infrastructure that premium brands require is a significant part of the investment,” he added.

The group’s third IT modernization pillar focuses on data and planning capabilities. Chen said Amer Sports is investing in integrating demand and supply planning tools, enabling brands to run more advanced forecasting and inventory management.

Retail firms have turned to AI in search of operations and customer experience improvement as weakening employment rates and high fuel costs create challenging shopping environments for consumers.

Companies pursuing AI deployments are often focused on use cases in marketing, IT and digital functions, digital commerce and merchandising strategy and pricing, according to a BRG report.

AI is already playing a part within Amer Sports’ IT infrastructure, with generative AI tools embedded in daily workflows across productivity, content, analysis and operational support, Chen said.

When implementing AI, Chen said his goal is to remove friction and repetitive work that gets in the way of employees applying their expertise and deep knowledge of the group’s brands, products, customers and markets. “AI creates the most value when it helps people focus on what they do best,” Chen said.

Last year, Amer Sports partnered with Personal AI, a small language model platform based on identity-based memory architecture that learns from a company’s data, memory and other patterns to provide a more personalized AI experience.

When it comes to successful AI use cases, Chen said what matters more than deployment breadth is depth of integration into workflows. He said an AI use case counts when it is regularly used and “measurably changing how work gets done, not when someone has logged in once.”

Getting thousands of employees onboard with new systems and adapting to new tools is a challenging part of any business transformation, he said.

“I want to be direct about the state of AI in our industry: It will be transformative, but how exactly and on what timeline is still genuinely uncertain,” he said. “The organizations that will win are those that build the governance and the agile capability to move quickly when the right use cases become clear, rather than those that over-commit to a specific vision today that may need to change.”

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