The Shoptalk Spring 2026 Key Takeaways Podcast

All right.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to your shop talk spring 2026 takeaways session.

I'm Chris Walton.

I'm the CEO and president of the Omnitalk Retail Podcast Network, which is the network that we hope makes you feel a little smarter about retail every week and also a little happier if we do our jobs right, too.

And you all in the audience, in addition to the three panelists next to me, are about to be part of an actual live podcast.

So everything you see and hear on stage over the next 40 minutes is going to be available via the Omnitalk Retail Podcast network, which you'll be able to access at any time following the conference, wherever you get your podcast.

So joining me is Ben Miller.

Ben is the VP of original content at Shop Talk.

Ben, welcome.

Let's give him a round of applause.

Let's get the live audience participation happening.

All right, Ben, how you doing?

Your full week in Vegas.

Ready for this?

Yeah.

Really good.

Let's bring it home.

All right.

And we've got Sarah Engel.

Sarah is the president of January Digital.

Sarah, welcome.

Thank you.

This is the last of my voice, guys.

This is it.

I know.

How many times have you been on stage?

I was trying to do the math last night.

Four times.

Yeah.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

And last but not least, of course, we have the man primarily responsible for all the great content we took in all week, Joe Laszlo, the head of content and insights for Shop Talk us.

Joe, welcome.

Always a pleasure to be on stage with you, Chris.

Thank you, man.

All right, so here's what we're going to do for the next 40 minutes, everyone.

I've selected eight topics, and I'm going to allot no more than four minutes each, give or take.

Depending on how long, you know, people want to talk, I might let them go a little bit long.

Might cut them off a little bit short, even.

We'll see.

But we're going to allow allot four minutes each of them, and we're going to try to keep the conversation moving.

So let's get right to the first question.

It's a question I've asked on this stage before in closing of shows.

So I'm going to ask it one more time.

AI.

Sarah, you're going to start us off.

AI.

We got to ask AI.

AI.

Overhyped, underhyped, or properly hyped?

I think I'm going to say both.

I'm not going to start strong.

I'm going to say both.

You're going to say both?

I will.

I Will wait.

You wait.

I don't know if I'm going to allow that.

It is overhyped in terms of people's fears and insecurities.

And I think the worries that are happening right now, I think it is probably underhyped in terms of how much it will impact the industry, how fast that will change, what, what we were actually going to be capable of in the future if we continue to like reskill and upskill and all keep like learning and keeping up with it.

But I think the fear, I mean, gosh, this week I've had so many fear based conversations with folks and I'm like, you know, gosh, everybody feels behind.

You're fine.

Like, let's just.

We're all in this together.

Let's just have a conversation.

So in that way, I hope people understand that part is a little overhyped.

You're going to be fine.

Your teams are going to be fine.

Just keep pushing.

So if I take the average then properly.

Yeah, properly.

I mean, it's hyped.

I think that would be my answer is, is that like this Shop talk, It feels like we're at the right amount of AI hype.

I heard less on our stages, partly partly by design and partly because we're at this stage in the evolution of the technology, less on our stage about like, we're going to do this in five years and more.

We are already doing this today and learning from it.

I think that's a sign that we've kind of gotten beyond just kind of the, the theoretical potential of AI and towards the actual working reality of it.

Who hopefully.

Okay, okay, I think I can get.

I think I can with that.

Ben, you gonna agree here with those two or are you gonna come at it from a different angle?

I think one of the things we were very cognizant of coming into this show is the classic Gartner hype cycle.

Yeah.

And the last thing we wanted to do was to try and create something that just drove hype.

At the same time, we were very mindful that whenever we spoke to people about what did you want to talk about at Shop Talk, people would tell us, AI, so how do you bounce?

So I guess it's more kind of a question for the audience and everyone listening.

What we try to do is get that proper hype, as in reflect that there is some really important happening.

But try, as Joe was saying, to talk about it from the practical, what does it mean?

And it's been really refreshing to hear people on stage talk about this trial that we're running this initiative that we're getting away this thing that we're doing rather than this belief that we have about what might happen.

And I think that's created a really refreshing and properly hyped conversation.

The other thing that we thought about a lot, I guess at times, I was going to say events in general, but let's be, let's be honest.

At Shop Talk, there's times when we're saying this is what's going to happen.

And you have people on stage, you're very confident in saying this is what's going to happen.

And anybody that isn't on board of doing it is basically an idiot.

And we wanted to reflect what we're hearing, that we have no what's going to come next.

The overwhelming feedback that I've had through the show is we don't know what's going to happen with AI.

We don't know what's going to happen with agentic.

That I think really you want to talk about getting ahead of us, but.

But we know we have to invest because the risk of not investing is greater than the risk of investing and getting it wrong.

So we put more debates in to help people hear different sides of the arguments to try and make up their own minds as well.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's a really good way to put it, Ben, because, you know, I've been in retail now almost 30 years and it's a good way to think about it.

Like when people don't have all the answers, it probably is properly hyped.

You know, I was making fun in Jess, Sarah, but that's probably where it is because, you know, otherwise you get people that are poo, pooing it or just rushing into it too quickly and you don't know the answers.

It's very, very humbling and tells you that we're probably talking about it the right way.

All right, so the next one, I'm going to keep it in the same realm, but I'm going to change it just slightly.

So agentic AI overhyped, underhyped or properly hyped.

And Joe, I'm going to go to you first because you are.

You invented a new term yesterday on stage called a commerce.

So I think I know which way you're going to roll on this one.

Maybe the most controversial single thing said on stage at the show this, this past week was when I said, by next year we'll all be calling it a commerce instead of agentic commerce.

But you know what Sarah's like.

No.

Your listeners can't hear my audience.

We may or may not like I could be wrong about that.

If it was a prediction everybody agreed with, it wouldn't be a good prediction.

But I think, I think agentic.

Agentic commerce.

Agentic AI.

Agentic AI Underhyped.

Agentic commerce may be overhyped.

Even though I'm the one that thinks E commerce is going to become the way that we shorthand refer to it.

And we will give you so much credit if that takes off all you.

I will bow down.

We're proud of you.

Yes.

I don't know if I could make fetch happen, but I'll try.

But so, but so net net.

You think it's slightly overhyped.

So I think, I think what agents are going to be able to do like behind the scenes of businesses to kind of help speed processes.

I think, I think that is going to be incredibly transformative.

I think, I think the jury's still out in my mind about like the strong kind of far end definition, the extreme definition of agentic commerce of like the bots are going to be doing your shopping for you.

Like I think that may be a little overhyped right now.

No denying that agents are going to help you make your purchase decisions, whether you make those decisions through E commerce storefronts or in physical stores.

But I think the idea that we're all just going to kind of sit back and agents will be kind of doing the grocery shopping or buying my new wardrobe or replacing the shirt that I somehow got to rip in, I think that's overhyped for the moment.

Okay, Ben, Agree.

Disagree.

Thumbs up.

Thumbs down on E commerce too while you're here.

I mean E commerce is clearly an abomination of the British language.

The British language.

One of the things that we wanted to do as well as having the debate was to reflect different bits of research.

So thinking back to Tuesday morning, which is only two and a half days ago, but feels like a lifetime ago, we opened the show with some research sessions on the AI stage and two of our partners had.

We commissioned and worked together to produce brand new research for the show.

So firstly, emarketer.

I'm sure many people in the audience and many of your listeners are very familiar with eMarketer.

You've used their black and red slides in publication.

They're really well respected.

Brand new research that they came out with the forecast that by 2029, 8.8% that's their average case of E commerce will be agentic.

Okay, so what they're basically saying is we're expecting a fragmentation of the ecom market.

So that's kind of putting agency commerce alongside social commerce.

You know, it's a bit fragment.

The next presentation up was Holden Bale from.

From Merkel.

Holden came out, I think.

I think if I'm being really honest, Holden has been a bit provocative.

He never does that.

He never does that.

Their forecast that they launched at the show was that they believe that by 2029, 25% of e commerce will be through answer engines.

So I think 25% of all E commerce will start on a Claude or a Gemini or.

And then in addition a further 10 to 25% will be entirely autonomous, will be entirely bot to bottom.

So that's up to 50%.

That's up to 50% of E commerce will be agentic.

And I think that's fascinating.

I think that's brilliant.

Provocation really gets you thinking about the reality and that's based on replenish the idea that you have shopping occasions that you want to invest time into and shopping occasions that you don't.

So I think Holden is overhyping it.

I think.

I think sky and E Marketer have underhyped it.

And I think the reality is probably to get ready for something in the middle, which is the scenario that most of the industry that we surveyed before the show with Placer said is how they're thinking about it.

Interesting.

I actually think they're both overhyping it.

But I'm curious, Sarah, what do you think?

You know, I would almost agree with the first half of what Holden said, but the second half, I mean.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

I think we're going to start.

I mean, how many of my searches right now are starting in Claude?

And then I narrow down and then nobody's tracking properly yet.

So they don't even know where I came from, which is a whole nother challenge.

But am I going to have agents doing that on my behalf?

To a large extent?

No, I don't think.

I think it is overhyped in that regard.

There are some really great examples that have come up at the show though.

I just talked with Alina, the president of David's Bridal and they are building agents to help women plan their entire wedding.

The 300 decisions that they're going to make for 18 months for their wedding, like, okay, that is a really great example, but it is not going through the process of actually purchasing on your behalf that that is where the breaking point happens on Overhype.

Yeah.

Right.

Last week we.

We kind of thought maybe we need to rewrite a whole bunch of things.

When OpenAI said that they were pulling away from checkout in chatbots.

Right.

But, but just two days ago they announced instead of that they are kind of doubling down on the research capabilities that ChatGPT brings to the shopping journey by adding a whole bunch of new, new features and capabilities on that side.

So again, as long as you define agent commerce broadly as like, you know, an agent kind of helps make a purchase decision, like then I think, I think that is absolutely happening in a vast real way.

It's just kind of that, that kind of hands off thing that I think is less likely to happen in the next by the time we all meet again.

Yeah, and that was Holden's main point too was that, you know, it's changing how we conduct search Commerce.

Right.

The LLMs are going to become the primary or a strong vehicle for how we conduct commerce via search and a new way to search.

And I think somebody also said that's like a 2% right now in terms of the amount and who knows what number is correct or not.

But getting from 2% now to the numbers that you're talking about just on the search side and then getting the agentic side in that too, like, I don't know, those numbers just seem lofty to me.

And the other thing too that makes me think of, there's a quote that I heard at Shop Talk originally, which is we always overestimate the change that will that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur over the next 10.

So I think that's a good perspective to have as we think about this question.

I'm not even sure if anybody's bold enough to make a 10 year prediction at this point.

Make a 10 month prediction.

10 Years is hard.

I mean, shop back 10 years ago, what were we talking about?

We weren't talking about this, that's for sure.

Yeah, there is AI, but it definitely wasn't agentic AI.

No, definitely not.

All right, next one.

Sarah, let's go back to you.

Okay.

What's the biggest change you observed in Shop Talk 2026 versus Shop Talk 2025?

You know, I think the biggest change is a very human change.

I think I've had so many conversations this week, I think a lot of the conversations on stage, this willingness to acknowledge that you don't know what comes next, you're a bit overwhelmed, you're not sure what to prioritize.

Hey, what are you doing?

Like ego is out right now.

Like there it Is this moment where I think people are just acknowledging and being really open about the challenges they're having.

I have not seen that happen since the, like, height very beginning, let's say April, May of 2020, when we're all like, oh, no, like, our stores are closed.

What are you doing?

We can't get FedEx packages out.

What are you doing?

Like, that was the last time I saw us behave this way.

I kind of thought, okay, we're gonna.

We're gonna stay that way.

Right?

And we didn't.

Everybody went to back to their corner in their bubble, and they.

And now all of a sudden, everybody's like, wait a minute.

This change is happening so fast.

I can't keep up.

I need to talk with other people and just have an honest conversation.

So, honestly, even from November of last year, I think that's changed a lot.

People's willingness to be like, I don't know all the answers.

Help me out.

What do you know?

Yeah.

Ego is very easy to see right now, and I think that's a big change.

Yeah.

And that's funny, too, because my answer to that question is actually, like, I had a lot of conversations with people off stage about how their C Suite executives are now focused on data for the first time, which is something that, you know, people always gave lip service to it.

But now, because of everything we just talked about in the first two questions, like, people are actually paying attention to it and figuring out what their strategy is going to be.

But.

So, yeah, and I think that comes along with what you're saying, because people aren't sure.

Joe, what do you think?

I mean, I think in terms of shop talk, spring 25 to 26.

Right.

Spring last year, we themed it Retail's New Golden Age.

Because I was feeling a little like, swagger in that moment, and I think there was a lot of that.

Again, back to the overhyped underhype.

Like, everybody was talking about, AI is going to be awesome and we've got this licked.

And, like, exactly to Sarah's point, this year was kind of like, we don't.

We don't know.

And just being able to admit that you don't know.

I think there are lots of moments of empathy where hopefully lots of people in the audience suddenly felt like, oh, maybe we're not as behind as we think we are, because everybody is at the very start of what's going to be a very long, transformational journey.

Yeah, yeah, you got swagger, Joe.

You're inventing terms like the whole nine yards.

Renaissance man over There.

All right, Ben, what do you think?

I think it's really.

I think last year people knew that they needed to talk about AI because they knew something was coming.

But the frustrating thing was that most people didn't really have anything worthwhile to say.

So you would.

You would have people almost kind of the number of times people would make a joke of, well, I can't do a presentation without saying AI.

And you'd roll your eyes because that's the fourth time you'd heard that joke today.

And then the feedback that we would get is you had too much AI AI fatigue.

The show, completely different this year because there isn't that element of AI fatigue.

There's an element of.

It is real, it is happening.

We need to invest, but we can't decide how.

We know what it is we want to learn, we want to hear.

It's not a joking matter.

It's something that's real and we're trying to figure it out.

And that's a massive change from a year ago and a change for the better.

And I really hope we've been able to capture the spirit of trying to help navigate what is really quick changing environment rather than talk about what could happen, but there's not much evidence behind it.

Yeah, that's a great point, too.

You can't.

Can't be tired of it because it's here to stay.

You know, it's going to be that impactful.

All right, let's shift gears away from AI for a second.

All right, so, Joe, I'm going to go to you on this one.

What is the most impact?

What do you think, in your mind was the most impactful topic or trend at the conference that you heard about that isn't AI?

Yeah, it was part of the design of the agenda, that it was important to us that amidst all of the talk of technology change that was so much a part of the conversation that we also kind of talked about keeping retail human.

And I think that came up time and again across every stage at the show.

The idea of.

I'm trying to kind of come up with one word to describe it, but whether it's trust or honesty, like, who do you trust in the age of AI?

Where are people turning to kind of feel an authentic connection?

And I don't.

I don't want to downplay the fact that for some human beings, like.

Like the chatbots actually are a source of emotional support or advice that they follow.

But.

But I think keeping retail human is the non AI thing, and it's maybe the Anti.

It's not anti AI, but it's the non AI thing that again, we kind of programmed it into the show.

But whether it's, you know, the Dutch Bros conversation and I think one of my quotes of the show is Christine Barone, the CEO of Dutch Bro, saying we, we sell, we sell emotion, not coffee.

Kind of just making somebody smile when they pick up their $6.

Highly colorful, highly caffeinated beverage is important to them.

As the, the sale itself to Steve Huffman from Reddit, kind of talking about like in his view, kind of we want human advice on our purchase decisions more so than we trust the bots, at least at this point.

So, so trust, I think is trusted.

Honesty are the two words I'd say were the most important non AI things.

Yeah.

And Joe, for those in the audience and those listening back home, Joe, you also led a debate around this topic.

Like how would you, you know, how would you sum up the mood in the room around that debate?

The debate being like, how much of our content and brand should be AI generated?

Like how some of.

We curated a debate yesterday on this stage and the theme of the debate was your next brand ambassador will be AI.

And one of the three things that the panel of debaters kind of discussed, debated was the LLMs are already your most important brand ambassador.

You're just not treating them that way.

But we did some audience polling to kick that off.

We asked people their sentiment on that and the negativity towards AI, you know, kind of that like people, people in the audience did not think, you know, AI influencers were going to be super important in the next couple of years.

They did not think that we're not going to be able to tell the difference between AI generated content design and human generated content in two years.

And I think the audience may be a little optimistic about some of that.

But, but there is still this, this sentiment that, that the human is more important or is more valued perhaps than, than than the AI for certain kinds of connection.

I feel like the Godfather.

Even though I try to get away from AI, it pulls me back in.

Sarah, what was, what was the topic or trend that you saw outside of AI for you?

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest, you know, it was like a loud minority talking about actual customer interactions.

And what does that mean?

And if we are all so focused on AI and every single employee has to be getting up to speed and how are we going to retrain people?

And like, it's so AI focused that like, it all of a sudden seemed really revolutionary to be like you should go to the stores and have a conversation like why don't you work, you know, work the store on Black Friday, like for the corporate team, those types of things.

I think Dutch Bros. Was a great example of like great get everybody empowered to make amazing experiences.

The like unreasonable hospitality moments in a coffee company, not in a luxury brand.

Like those types of moments all of a sudden seemed revolutionary.

And the reality is like that is the basis of what we all started retail to begin with.

Like what we wanted to do was customer connection.

So it is kind of interesting to me that that is an outlier topic.

But I think it was a really loud vocal minority.

Yeah.

We did a session titled Stores as venues for Connection featuring Target Simon Property Group and Glossier.

Glossier, the startup or formerly D2C.

Now they've got some brick and mortar stores, beauty brand and Glossier actually designs their stores not just to facilitate interactions between the store associates and customers, but also between customers themselves.

They have some like try on tables that don't have mirrors so that you try something on.

Then you turn to the stranger next to you and say, how does this look?

Look?

And they.

It's a very clever, very subtle design choice in the physical store to kind of encourage that kind of interaction because I don't know, we keep hearing the stats about how gen zers like to go to malls again.

And I think one of the reasons is because people are craving that connection, even if it's with a stranger, even it's for two minutes to say, hey, you look great.

That's a good color on you.

Like that People want that.

Yeah.

Retail is inherently a social experience.

It's one of the five reasons you go to a store.

Right.

Ben, what do you think?

I was going to talk about authenticity as well.

Authenticity creators.

But I'm not going to because I just want to briefly and I know you want to move us on.

Talk about my favorite moment of the show.

Okay.

My favorite moment of the show was for those of you who were into the YouTube and Jessica Albert honors company Kino today.

The moment that Jessica went completely off script and started to challenge YouTube on Do you understand the supply chain implications of creator led demand creation?

So Jessica Albert and demand planning was not on my bingo card for this show.

We had a panel next show.

I mean we had Victoria supply chains.

Yeah, Victoria's secrets yesterday bring back sexy.

I was like, let's make supply chain sexy.

That's a campaign I'm going to get behind.

And you know, look in all seriousness, demand planning into demand Sensing, managing through uncertainty, managing through risk, ranging from macroeconomic turmoil, which we're in yet again, super important and something we need to lean even more into.

Yeah.

All right, I'm going to do the moderator trick here where I'm going to bridge into the next one by giving my answer to that question, but also bridging into the next one.

So for me, the topic that was an AI that I still think is impactful and probably isn't getting discussed enough is marketplaces.

And the reason I say that, so the next question I'm going to ask these guys is what was the stat of the show?

And for me, and I don't remember, it wasn't for me, it wasn't an exact stat.

But I heard this great presentation on the state of E commerce retail from the former founder of Statista, and he basically said, like, when you look at E commerce, E commerce is marketplace.

It's where all the volume is and it's where all the growth is happening.

And that presentation really hit me very clearly in the mouth in terms of like, wow, yeah, he's right.

That is what it is.

And the other thing too is the list of who's winning in that space.

Like the top 10 marketplaces.

It's not changing either.

It's not changing to the same degree as physical retail leadership is changing over that same time horizon.

So that was my stat of the show.

But Ben, what was your stat of the show?

Okay, so my stat of the show was from the E Market presentation, from Sky's presentation on day one.

And I'm just going to read till I get this right.

60% Of shoppers say that when an answer engine recommends them a product, their next step is to go and do more research on their own.

18% Say their next action is to just completely ignore it, which kind of.

I'm confused about that.

18%.

So you're left with less than a quarter who don't want to move to transaction.

So we've been talking about our answer engine's direct the plug into commerce, or are they a search and discovery platform?

I think right now Shopper Behavior is saying it's a search and discovery platform and we've got the numbers to prove that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's probably a fair assumption.

Though, Sarah, there are a lot of amazing quotes on stage, but since you asked me, I want to talk about what I want to talk about, which is in our debate, we talked a lot about is AI going to be a threat or an opportunity to your job?

And I think this Stat that has come out.

It came from the Brookings Institution of the amount that women will be disproportionately impacted by AI job loss.

I think is really important to talk about.

So, you know, the research actually says that that are both going to, are highly exposed to AI job loss and have a low ability to adapt.

They're not going to get the training, there's not going to be the adaptation.

86% Of those are women.

And so I, you know, if you're going to give me the floor, I'm going to say what I want to say.

Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a very good.

So it is our responsibility as leaders to ensure that we are getting everybody equally trained, everybody equal access to what's happening from an AI perspective.

Yeah.

100 Brilliant, Joe.

I have two.

I have a fun stat and I have a more serious stat.

My fun stat is I'm the one who did this, so I'm responsible.

But there were six people named Joe speaking at Shop Talk over the last several days.

3.3% Of shop talk speakers, which is a record.

We're named Joe.

So it's a record.

You've calculated any Joe's in the audience?

Joe.

Joe.

Over ten years of shot.

That's a record.

Joe Cano, Joe Shoemaker from Snipes, a few more Joes.

So that's my fun stat, my more serious stat.

Steve Huffman from Reddit pointed out that, you know, we, we tend to think of Reddit as being very uncommercial, almost like anti commercial.

But, but 40% of conversations on Reddit are about like finding a product, making a product decision.

And so to his point about, and to the point we've been talking about, about where, who do you trust?

Where do you turn when you kind of want to know what to buy?

Like Reddit is really important for that and a lot of people use it that way.

So 40% of conversations on Reddit have some kind of a purchase or shopping or commercial implication.

We're seeing so much more attention paid to Reddit from an advertising perspective.

Like it was the, it's feeding into ChatGPT.

And as soon as that was said, it was like everything they've been trying to tell people for a long time from an advertising perspective.

So I would agree with that.

Right, right.

All right, great, great stats, Joe.

Both on both fronts.

All right, 50% of my stats were great.

Yeah.

And my son's name is Joe too, so that's great.

All right.

Quote of the show, quote of the Show.

Joe, I'm going back to you.

What was your quote of the show?

Yeah, Hilary, super Victoria's Secret yesterday said that when she was talking about embracing owning, being sexy, because that is what Victoria's Secret brand is.

She said the change is.

Victoria's Secret used to be prescriptive.

It used to tell you what sexy was, and now it is part of a conversation.

It is about being what its customers want sexy to be.

And I kind of think whatever adjective your brand lives like, that is the journey that everybody has been on from being like, we define this for you to we're in a conversation about it with you, with their customers.

Interesting.

All right, Sarah, okay, this is one that I've heard so much back at me, which is why I know it was the stat of the show or the quote of the show.

I think it is Colleen Waters yesterday from Steve Madden on stage announcing, like they had announced it the day before, but that you could doordash your shoes now.

You can just doordash them right now.

Get your sushi, get your shoes.

And she made the point of like, if you're here, ladies, and it's your first time and you don't have your conference shoes and your feet hurt.

And I've had 15 people come up and be like, I doordash these shoes.

I doordash these shoes.

So I'm gonna say it was a very directional quote and I appreciate how hard they're pushing.

That's really interesting too, because I, yeah, I think I would say I doordash that, but I don't know if I'd say I instantly to cart that.

You know, like, when you think about it, in the landscape of how our language is changing, that's a really.

That's a really intriguing point.

All right, Ben, what was your quote of the show with the British language?

I've got actually a couple of things that Max, Max Magni from Macy's said in their keynote.

So really interesting.

We had CEO of Macy's two years ago, Tony Spring.

He came and said the new vision.

And then we invited two of the C suite back to years later to update us on progress.

And Max is the Chief Digital Officer.

And he said two things that just really resonate.

One is he just summed up retail as relevance, experience and value.

And for all the talk about agentic AI, it's just like getting back to basics of a relevant proposition, giving people a great experience and delivering the value that they need.

So it was just a reminder of the retail basics, which I loved.

And then later in the conversation, he said, stores are our most important assets.

And we know that, but it's.

How refreshing is it to hear a Chief Digital Officer say that on stage and help ground the conversation?

Yeah.

Especially at Macy's, too.

Yeah.

All right, Mine was.

I'm going to give a shout out to a good friend of mine who gave a presentation, Chad Lusk of the AM Consumer and Retail Group.

He gave a presentation on the state of consumer sentiment.

And he did it in a very unique way because he made an allusion to Breaking Bad and Walter White.

And he said, quote, quote, while the American consumer isn't cooking meth, they are similarly making extreme behavior changes in response to all the macroeconomic factors that are out there, end quote.

That's wrong.

And so I'll just leave it at that.

You know, it's not often you get to reference that show in that way.

All right, we got two more.

We got plenty of time for two more.

All right, next one most memorable off stage insight.

What did you hear offstage that stuck with you?

Sarah?

You know what?

I'm going to.

Speaking of shouting people out, I'm a shout out.

Sarah Wallace, who's the chief operating officer of Minted, has a phenomenal retail background, athletic, Gap, other places.

Anyway, we were having a conversation off stage with a lot of other, you know, brands and retailers standing around us, and everybody unanimously agreed with her perspective, which is over the last, let's say, decade, there's been like all of these, like, crises that retailers and brands have gone through.

Right.

We've like, we just moved, moved from one to another to another.

And it's like always this, like, crisis of identity and what do we need to do next?

And it's like, you know, the sky is falling at all times.

All of a sudden she was feeling that, and I think we were all feeling that from the tech companies here and not as much from the retailers and brands here in the sense that all of a sudden they're going, I have a physical product to sell.

Yeah, I am not.

Everything I'm doing is not based on the technology that is changing every single day.

I don't, you know, that.

I don't know how to explain that.

I don't know how to get up to speed.

And so it was a kind of an interesting moment that people, you know, and I know that there is a lot of fear and a lot of trepidation, of course, from brands and retailers, but that there's.

That finally this moment where that crisis and, you know, is feeling a little bit more Resilient and a little bit more like, also, like, we made it through Covid, we made it through this, we made it through that, made it through the tariffs.

Like, we'll be all right.

Like, there is a sense of resilience and hope that I. I don't know that I expected because I thought there was so much fear that the resilience wasn't there.

And the resilience is there right now.

That's interesting though, because, yeah, the tangibility of what we do in retail is really important.

Like you still have to tangibly do that and get those products to customers, which you can take solace in if you think about it in the right way.

Ben, most memorable insight you heard off stage.

Yeah.

And this was kind of somebody that challenged me and really got me thinking.

I think one of the things I'm very conscious of when we try and talk about content and we try and talk about the industry on stage is to avoid kind of really tired cliches.

So I hate it whenever people declare that anything is dead, whether it's physical store, whatever it is, it's just they're not.

It's nuanced.

Let's have a grown up conversation.

But somebody tapped me on the shoulder and pulled me up for doing a cliche myself.

And that was during our zeitgeist yesterday.

Yesterday evening somebody told me you said that cliche that the pace of change is unprecedented.

What I'm trying to think about is how do we A, talk about and B, as an industry, respond to the fact that the industry is changing incredibly quickly.

And it feels like you're changing incredibly quickly, but in a practical and actionable way rather than just a cliche way?

How do you do it in a way that's helpful to help companies navigate it?

And I'm still reflecting a lot on that.

Yeah, that's interesting too.

I'm going to share mine now because I think it's probably the appropriate place to share it is I did a podcast with the CEO of a company called Duvo and prior to this he was the founder of Roll IT Group, which for those that may not be familiar, is probably the most one of, if not the most successful E grocer in Europe.

And now he's got the AI bug.

And the conversation struck me and I wrote it down because I want to make sure I said it to everyone the right way.

And the learning I had, which is similar to what Ben was talking about in a lot of ways, is not only can AI be used to improve retail operations, but it can also be leveraged to determine how one's operations should actually be improved.

And so when you think about that, it's really powerful because that means AI is not only our consultant, but it's also our operator all rolled into one.

And so that is kind of the insight that I've been talking about constantly at this show.

Joel, finish us out on this one.

Yeah, it's not so much an insight, just like an interesting quote, I suppose.

And I'm stealing it from my colleague H.G.

O', Connell, who, like, yesterday afternoon heard somebody walking around in the exhibit hall saying, I hope there's a retail rumble again tonight.

For those who weren't there, the retail rumble happened on the first night of the show on this stage where we had six, eight really, really smart, really brave people, including Sarah Engel, willing to just kind of stand up and to Ben's point, about getting away from cliches, just kind of really, you know, kind of take the gloves off, as it were, and kind of have, in a fun way, kind of a serious argument about four big issues, four big changes going on across the industry.

And debates are something shopdoc has internally debated about.

Do we even try to do that?

Can we get people to disagree on our stage?

But I think.

I think it worked really well.

It was super fun.

We did a couple of other debates over the course of the three days because I think we're at a moment in time when people can reasonably disagree and hopefully in a grown up kind of way, that the rumble was a little bit like, punchy at times, but by design.

And I think it's something we need to work on to kind of make sure that our shows have this combination of insights and inspiration, get away from the cliches and also where you guys just kind of need to know a range of different perspectives so you can pick your own, like offering those.

So more things like the retail rumble.

And maybe that facilitated kind of the feeling that Sarah mentioned in the beginning.

Like, there was a lot of, you know, constant chatter about, like, we don't really know the answers.

And we're debating it too, as we go along, so.

All right, last one.

It's one of my favorite words to use, epiphany.

Ben, what was your biggest epiphany that you now know coming out of this show that you didn't know going in?

Yeah.

The thing that's really made me stop and think differently is the number of conversations about how positive it is when people are spending more time on retailers, websites.

So a number of different Times.

It even came up in the keynote today.

Macy's talked proudly about people now spending two to three more times on their site than they used to when they used their AI tools.

Other people have said when they're spending time using AI agents, AI answer engines, they're spending more time on it.

And I think we've been spending so long thinking about the website as how do you optimize, how do you make it as quick as possible, how do you get people through?

And that's been a real KPI time on site minimize.

And now people are celebrating spending longer on site and building the brands and telling the stories.

And I think it's really making me think about what a good website and a good e comm experience looks like.

Yeah.

And where do you focus your resources on trying to improve first and foremost.

Right.

You focus there.

Do you focus on the engines?

What?

Exactly.

Maybe I'll jump in next because mine kind of expands, expands on and generalizes a bit from Ben's, but kind of builds on the same conversation.

Right.

I think we are at a moment where everybody is talking so much about speed.

Faster, faster, faster.

And to your point about like, sometimes slower is actually better.

If somebody's engaging with content, if somebody's finding exactly that thing that they want, if somebody's enjoying the content on a retailer's website, more time is good.

And Barbara Cameron actually talked about kind of sometimes slowing down in stores as well is the important thing.

When associates are free to kind of notice a customer who's harried and looks worried and kind of really engage with them and help a customer out, those are the moments that shoppers, again, whether it's in the digital world or in the physical world or across the two, those are the moments shoppers remember.

And they're the things that in this day and age build loyalty.

So I think in this very, very speed focused moment, and I'm not saying that speed isn't important, I think knowing when to go slower, knowing when a little friction is actually a good thing for the customer is super important.

Sarah.

All right.

I think I said it a little bit about the kind of resilience of retail, but like, I think that resilience and community were probably the biggest epiphany.

And by that I mean whether it is on these stages or whether it is in the halls and in other conversations and other meetings, like, we will all keep talking about the things that are impacting us and we will all figure it out.

And I think, I mean, the number of conversations I had that Were not necessarily on the stage about the impact of tariffs.

And are you selling, Are you selling it versus are you actually going after your tariff money?

And those type, like, everybody's sharing how they're doing it and sharing their contacts.

You know, the rulings this week in terms of mental health impact on minors with social.

Those conversations are happening and what are you thinking about it and how are you going about this?

You know, the change is so constant, like, whether it is AI related or not, the change is so constant and the pressure is so constant that, like, the resilience is there, but also like the community exists to continue to help one another.

And I think, I think the show not to pander to these guys, but the show does do a great job of creating those micro pockets of communities.

And then there's so many, like, events and meetings and those things that happen.

But I think that resilience and community was like stronger.

Honestly, it's stronger than I've seen it since probably like 2020.

2021.

Well, we've been through a heck of a lot as an industry in the last five to six years, without a doubt.

You know, for me, I think when I.

When I think about retail innovation, like, if you look at it historically, it cycles every 30, you know, 30 to 40 years, right?

And the last big innovation we had was E commerce.

And now we're in the age of AI.

And what's interesting to me is that.

And it goes back to why I started with the first two topics that we started today, like, you know, where is agentic AI and is it overhyped?

And I think where we came down as a panel was that we said that, you know, on the consumer side, the agentic side is pretty probably overhyped in terms of the impact it's potentially going to have on the way consumers shop, or at least we're tempering our bets.

For me, I think, though, where the transformation is really going to happen and where the innovation in retail comes into play is actually how we do our work, how we organize our organizations around things and therefore what the resulting business models are and what the new income statements of retail are going forward into 2030 and into 2040.

I think that's.

That's the interesting change that's coming on the horizon for me that I hadn't really thought about until I came to this show.

So nice job to you guys for getting me to think about that.

That was really good.

All right, that wraps us up.

Let's give a big round of applause to our panelists and as I say, at the conclusion of every one of our Omnitalk podcasts, it's always applicable in Vegas.

It's always applicable these days when you head to the airport.

Be careful out there.