Retail Transformation Strategist | Simplifying Complexity and Driving Omnichannel Growth | Fractional Executive & Board Advisor | Speaker | RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert 2025
AI is BS. Not the technology. The talk track. I attended the NRF Foundation Big Show this week, and everything was “AI-something.” AI for inventory. AI for pricing. AI for customer service. AI for world peace (okay, maybe not yet). With all that noise, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed—and a bit cynical. The possibilities are incredible, but slapping “AI” on everything doesn’t make it useful. Understanding how these tools work to solve actual business problems is critical. I’ve found it’s helpful to kind of simplify it into the two categories that really matter: ?? Generative AI is like an extremely knowledgeable friend who can produce new things—written content, images, & beyond—if asked in just the right way. A chatbot interface makes that generative AI friend more accessible: you give it a prompt (for example, “Write a short product description for a new running shoe”), and it instantly creates a response from all the information it has internalized. ???♀? Agentic AI goes further. It's more like a proactive personal assistant with the same deep knowledge. Instead of waiting on precise prompts, it can infer tasks and even carry them out automatically. For example, it can figure out when stock is running low & reorder items without being explicitly told every step to take. How retailers might use each: 1???Generative AI: Product Descriptions: Automatically create rich, engaging product descriptions for online catalogs that match the brand’s voice. Marketing Content: Draft email campaigns, social media copy, & blog posts. Store Layouts & Visuals: Suggest store display ideas or mockups, using AI-generated images to spark new merchandising concepts. 2?? Agentic AI: Inventory Management: Monitor incoming sales data & reorder items proactively before inventory runs out. Customer Service Automation: Act on customer requests (like returns or shipping updates) without a staff member walking it through each step. Dynamic Pricing: Continuously check market trends, competitor prices, and demand patterns, then adjust product prices accordingly—without needing a person to oversee it all. I think Agentic AI will provide the biggest benefits and the biggest disruptions because consumers love convenience and businesses love efficiency – and it delivers both. AI is evolving faster than Moore’s Law—doubling every 3 months instead of 18. Do the math—it’s mind-blowing. Moore’s Law gets you 10X improvement in 5 years. At this pace, AI could be 1,000,000X in 5 years! (h/t Kasey Lobaugh) In just a few years, we could see retail transformed by super-powered sales associates, hyper-personalized shopping journeys, and supply chains optimized to unimaginable levels. But first we have to cut through the noise to make sure we’re making the right choices. Are you experimenting with any tools successfully—or are you overwhelmed by the hype (or both!)? #AI #agenticAI #agents #retail #NRF
Jon Nordmark
1 个月
You're right. The pace is overwhelming and everyone claims to have it. Our job at Iterate.ai is to embed it in daily work-life, to reduce the noise. Make it invisible. We do that with frictionless payments at Circle K has stations in the EU. With social media management solutions. With Generate, a private AI assistant. By embedding Generative AI RAG-type readouts into Qualcomm 6490 devices at point of sale and such. And so on. Great seeing you at the show, Kevin Ertell . Let's Zoom late this week or next.
Megan Burns
1 个月
Personally, it's a bit of both. Clients are using AI in specific areas of their business where the use case and benefits are clear. My advice with any hyperbolic trend is to stick to the basics - what do we need or want to do, and how might thing technology help us do it better, faster, more efficiently, or more humanely? Those questions remain the same with any tool. If it doesn't have a purpose (and that purpose isn't something that adds value to people's lives), it will fall off the radar soon enough.
Ethan Holland
1 个月
I'm using Claude to write some serious scripts to interact with APIs... and it's saving me about 10 hours/week. If I was still in e-commerce I'd be writing all sorts of code to do competitive analysis. Co-pilots more for me than agents. I would add multimodal AI as a third item to add to this list (above). It's going to get wild. Then embodied robots! I'm bummed by the brand-washing because it takes away from the biggest thing since the internet....
Paul Greenberg
1 个月
Great points. I also think gen AI can also (very soon) be used to create product videos just from the description. The speed of change is indeed mind-boggling.
Marty Armstrong
1 个月
Well said, Kevin. I've been cautioning many about the "noise" and "AI" tagalongs in the industry right now. There are real use cases and real opportunities, but there are real pitfalls and plenty of vaporware as well. It's a hype cycle right now, but eventually, the picture will become more clear.
Patrick Zimmer
1 个月
Love the distinction between generative AI as a knowledgeable friend and agentic AI as a proactive assistant - it really cuts through the marketing hype to focus on practical business value. At UnleashU, we've found that thinking about AI as augmenting human capability rather than replacing it helps teams embrace these tools more effectively and focus on where they can truly make an impact.
Andrew Orr
1 个月
This is a great summary, Kevin. Most companies I've talked with are using Generative AI to help with marketing & content, but I honestly haven't seen much on the agentic front (yet). The next few years will certainly be interesting to see how AI plays out.
Will Larson
1 个月
"History doesn't repeat but it Rhymes" We are in the late 1990s of the Internet Fractal. Lots of hype and promise, it might faulter at first but it's here and only going to get bigger (not necessarily for the better). The next 10 years will be strange. Think 1995 to 2005 in e-commerce.
Founder & CEO at pass_by - Transforming retail with AI | Forbes 30 under 30
1 个月The hype is what is needed to educate the majority of people. I think most people think AI = ChatGPT. Yes slapping 'AI' on as a moniker for everything is somewhat annoying for those who know the difference between AI and not AI, but how is this different from the time everyone added '.com' to their brand to score a 50x valuation bump. Fact is, within a decade AI will no longer be specifically carved out, it will just be part of the expectation, just like how companies no longer have to say 'dot com' at the end of their brands. So let people be interested and excited and yes, overuse the term. It's this excitement that creates meaningful growth in the adoption of the technology. There will always be snake oil - in any industry, so if someone wants to create a 'hot dog' AI or say that their coffee blend is powered with AI -so be it.