Section
How software, AI, and data are reshaping retail operations.
12 articles
Europe's largest tech conference runs November 9 to 12 at the MEO Arena and FIL. The featured speakers lean heavily on Chinese AI and robotics, and two of them are robots. Retail to See will cover all four days, looking for the tools before they reach the store.
Outside Lisbon, Web Summit now runs editions in Brazil, Qatar and Canada, plus RISE in Asia. Every one of them reported a record this year. Read side by side, the records say less about technology than about what each host government is paying to become.
Since it left Dublin in 2016, Web Summit has turned a Lisbon arena into Europe's largest annual tech gathering. The attendance curve has flattened, the investor count has not, and the 2023 crisis showed how much of the event still rests on one man.
The grocery industry met at Mandalay Bay from September 22 to 24. Instacart promised the biggest shift in grocery's history, Kroger talked about trust and data integrity, and retail media stopped being described as advertising.
After years of gimmicky AR mirrors, AI-powered virtual try-on is reaching the accuracy threshold where it actually reduces returns. The early data is encouraging.
A practical look at where retailers have replaced human copywriters with LLMs, where they've quietly reverted, and what the unit-economics actually look like.
Retail media keeps getting called the highest-margin business in retail. We unpack who's actually capturing those margins and who's spending them on tech that doesn't ship.
After a year of CV-at-the-shelf pilots, the early data shows shrink reduction is real but inconsistent - and the labor it shifts is more than the labor it removes.
Two years into the rip-and-replace MACH wave, several mid-market retailers are re-platforming back to monoliths. Here's the cost they're trying to recover.
Agent-based shopping - where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers - is shifting from demo to deployment. Retailers are scrambling to figure out which agents to allow, which to block, and how to price for either.
Brands are pulling back from retail media networks that can't survive an honest attribution audit. The 2025 budgets are being repriced - and several mid-tier RMNs are about to feel it.
A wave of retailers rolled out AI-powered shopping assistants this year. The ones that survived contact with customer behavior look very different from the launch demos.