How AI is bringing human connection back to retail: Key highlights from NRF 2026 

From Ryan Reynolds’ talk on his fast-growth gin brand to learning how Walmart has teamed up with Google’s Gemini for AI-assisted shopping, there was one very clear theme throughout almost all of this year’s talks: success in retail today depends on using technology to understand each one of your unique consumers – and acting accordingly. Agata Ramallo Garcia from Target advised retailers to know what customers most care about before introducing any and every solution. 

Above all, if there was one word that dominated conversations (beside “Deadpool”), it was “AI”. From frictionless check-out to immersive in-store experiences, it’s being used impressively at every stage of the commerce journey.  

Agentic AI is transforming everything. Of course, planning and forecasting benefit greatly from it. We see the impact it can have every day in our work analyzing logistics, product and customer data points far faster than would be physically possible. But it’s also being used at the other end of the journey, supporting frontline staff to offer meaningful, elevated customer moments.  

At LVMH and Louis Vuitton’s keynote session, we heard how luxury brands use AI to amplify creativity (e.g cutting the amount of time it takes to test and choose materials), as well as providing the human touch. LVMH builds intimate, personalized experiences by using AI to anticipate individual preferences and create a continuous, coherent story for each client.  

For the retailers we work with, the potential lies in using agentic AI to achieve this level of personalization at scale.

• Systems: Leading retailers now have single core-operation models and access to real-time data having unified their e-commerce, in-store POS, inventory, loyalty and fulfillment platforms into a seamless omnichannel experience. And what an impact it can have. President of Shopify, Harley Finkelstein, highlighted the exponential growth in AI-driven orders on the e-commerce site with a 14x increase since January 2025.
• Stores: The role of physical stores is evolving into multi-purpose hubs – not just for creating experiences with technologies like AR, VR and spatial computing but as community hotspots, fulfillment points and data capture environments.
• Staff: AI partners, task automation and frictionless workflows are freeing up frontline staff to interact meaningfully with customers. This is arguably not an entirely new trend: we see in our own work how enabling and empowering shop floor teams with the data to make decisions in the moment can pay dividends. But the urgency to act is heightened by both labor pressures and the need for real connection in an AI world.

Unlocking measurable retail success this year will require customer understanding and operations fueled by AI, unified data and automation. These are the every day in the world’s leading retailers.