Most Overhyped Technology - What Failed to Deliver? | Fast Five Shorts

Most overhyped retail technology of the year.

And I went to smart carts for this one.

Smart cards.

Oh, used to be on the smart cart bandwagon.

I did.

But I, I really had a problem with one particular headline that was coming out of Instacart this year that was talking about the number of stores that had deployed.

And, and my biggest, like, sticking point on that was that we don't know anything about how many carts are in those stores.

We don't know how, you know, what the payment structure, structure is.

And so I think it kind of gave false confidence for retailers who were considering those putting smart carts in as though like, oh, this is a deployment with, you know, 100 carts, or we're replacing all of our carts and putting in smart carts and we're seeing all this success.

And yes, that, that's fine in those stores, but when we, when you get down to it, and we've talked to a lot of grocery retailers who are testing them this year, and they have like 10 carts in the store or maybe 20 carts in the store, if that.

And so I think, I just, I think that for me, I think they were early on in the year, and especially coming out of grocery shop last year, I was starting to see more of the possibilities.

I still see the, the possibilities in the technology.

But I think when you're looking at all of the decisions that grocers have to be making right now about how to continue the success of their business, and I, I wouldn't be leaning into smart carts.

I would be leaning into transparent pricing, like Chad said earlier.

I'd be leaning into electronic shelf labels that can return a quick ROI or even, you know, in store robotics to start to get some of this, the shelf view technology that, that, you know, the smart carts are starting to add on to what their capabilities are.

Like, those are the things that I would be focused on.

I would not be beating.

Be putting, you know, tens of thousands of dollars per cart into my store.

So that's my overhyped technology of the year.

No, I think that's a good one.

So you're basically calling out the.

I think it was the modern retail article, right?

Where they said, like, instacart store placements are up 300% over the year before.

But there was.

We don't really know what that means and that you're, you're right.

It's a very risky place to, to put your money if you're a retailer.

But you can understand it too, because the retail media craze, it's that we talked about on last year's show being overhyped.

You know, technology aspect of things.

All right, Chad, what about you?

What's your most overhyped retail technology of the year?

I have a feeling you might be going in the same direction I did.

I don't.

I don't know.

This is gonna sound like an odd one, given the conversations that we've been having and the fact that I've already given a couple for AI oriented things, but.

All right, hear me out, Chris.

I think you will agree with me.

I think you will agree with me, but.

But we'll see.

Okay, Overhyped, or let me rephrase ahead of the reality.

We're too fast on it.

Whatever.

It's agentic AI commerce.

100%.

Right.

All right, Good, good, good.

Yes, that's mine too.

Mine too.

All right.

I mean, listen, I know it sounds blasphemous because it, like, listen, it's our future to an extent, full stop.

Like, there's no dispute there in terms of where this locomotive is going.

It's also anything anyone's talking about, and that's why it scares me.

Right?

Like, we're so early.

Like, if you.

If you go back and look at the trajectory of headlines just in this year alone, right?

In March, March, we were talking about Google's new AI shopping tool.

And we actually had a couple of, you know, crgers on the podcast, and you guys were debating whether it was even being discussed in retailer boardrooms, right?

Like, Walmart announced Sparky In June in Q2, like, we were talking about being able to transact directly in chat GPT, like integration with Shopify.

But then by July, Shopify was already saying, like, we got to put some limits in place and block the bots from making purchases without human review.

Right?

Like, it's gone so Fast, fast.

From Q1 intrigue to Q4 chief AI officers and every team and boardroom, like, forcing themselves to take a stance and saying they feel behind.

Right?

And how I know it's gone too far, too fast, and this I know you'll 100% agree with me.

Oh, my God.

You're gonna say what I'm gonna say no.

100%.

Right.

Target gave away Farm.

Yes.

Putting its digital experience directly into chat GPT versus owning it.

Right?

So I'll end where I started, Right.

I cannot and will not minimize the direction and importance of this movement, for sure.

But the reactions and what consumers are even doing on it as a commerce platform, way overhyped in the here and now.

Okay, Case closed.

Wow.

Wow.

I mean, you literally said what I was going to say, Chad.

Like I'm gonna read the notes here verbatim that I had here for the audience because like, you literally said what I said.

Like I, I picked agentic AI too.

So yes, a technology can be the technology of the year, but also be overhyped at the same time.

And particularly it's the consumer facing side of agentic AI that's overhyped.

And to me, the number, the number one experiment that was the proof point for that to me was what you said.

Target putting its app directly in the interface during peak, two days before peak, that shows me that people are right.

Two days before peak, that there's no reason to do that, absolutely none strategically.

And it shows me that retailer.

And then there were a flood of announcements after that.

So I don't want to just single out Target because, like, you know, I probably have that reputation to some degree.

I don't want to do that.

There are a lot of retailers that have followed suit on that, that type of thing, you know, and, and it shows me that there's kind of digging around in the dark without a flashlight and everyone, I agree with you, Chad.

Everyone just needs to take a breath, slow down, decide who they are strategically and what's most important to them in terms of allocating their resources.

But, and I don't.

And do you want to jump in here, you guys?

I think I understand the points of view.

I do think that there's prudence that needs to be applied to like, what is the right move, what's the strategy?

I think people personally don't, I don't think we understand all of the facets of this.

So I think to go after Target, any retailer who is experimenting in this way, to me, without us being able to see the long tail effect of what, like my whole thing is like everybody's experimenting right now.

Yes, everybody's going into the dark without a flashlight right now.

I think that you have to test and figure out what reasons there were to make the moves that they did because Target's not the only one doing it.

They, they maybe were looking at what are Walmart, what's Walmart doing?

And do we want to do the opposite of that so that we can test and see if this works.

And again, I think, I think we're giving too much credit.

And not that it's, it's your fault or anyone's fault, but I think Target put that out as a we and you said it, Chris.

This is a PR move.

They're talking about getting involved so that they can get credit for testing AI but it's still in beta.

They're not going live with it to the same extent that Walmart did.

So I think we can't punish people right now for testing a variety of different methods of attacking this very, very new way of doing commerce.

So that's my only thing is that I agree, slow the roll, that's fine.

But also, everybody's going to have to test and learn for a little while till they figure out what the right move is.

So.

Yeah, but I don't know.

But with that said, I mean that part of the reason we started the show is to say that not all experiments are good experiments.

And so sometimes we hear the phrase we're experimenting as the catch all for, like, we made a good decision when in reality it might not be a good experiment.

So, Chad, I'm curious, last word here.

How do you, how do you reconcile the conversation?

Yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll reconcile that.

So I completely agree.

Right.

Which is why I tried to caveat in terms of, like, this is overhyped now, in terms of its effect.

Now you look at some of the numbers even from Black Friday, and like, they're not even as impactful as I would have expected some of them to be.

Right.

Compare that to, you know, like smart carts.

Right.

We've been talking about smart carts for, I don't know, what was the first advent of when that came out?

Maybe two years ago, three years ago?

I don't know.

Whatever it is, in reality, it's like 30 years, but yeah, yeah.

And you're giving that overhyped in 2025, which means there has been testing.

There has been, but people, people have dabbled with that.

It's still kind of sitting there.

And like, okay, it didn't work.

We are in barely the first inning of this technology and people absolutely should be testing against it.

But just how I hear the conversations develop in terms of the be all, end all now.

Right, Like, I agree with you, Chris, however you said it, like, let's take a pause, let's take a breath, let's test, let's learn.

This is an incredibly ambiguous space, so let's treat it like that versus diving in head first.