Technology of the Year - What Innovation Won 2025? | Fast Five Shorts

Retail Technology of the Year.

What wins your award for retail technology of the year?

Yeah, I man, I circled the wagon a couple times in terms of how I wanted to address this one.

But you'll see in a later Omni why I didn't just go with like pure agentic AI commerce or something like that.

What I'm going with is and go with me on this one, pricing transparency afforded through AI.

And I'm going to specifically, I'm going to specifically use grocery deals as an example of this.

Right.

So for those who don't know it and you featured one of the founders of grocery Deals I think in a retail tech spotlight some time ago.

Yeah, it's basically the gas buddy of grocery.

Right.

Where and even just get getting piloted in one market mid year as when this was announced.

So it's not like it's taken off yet but it price compares like items across grocery retailers and helps you build an online cart for the grocery industry.

Right.

Like this is super disruptive and scary probably to grocery retailers at least of a certain type.

Right.

Particularly high low pricers which is slowly, maybe not slowly becoming an antiquated model anyway.

But with this kind of technology it eases the ability for AI agents to coordinate offers orders from different grocers on price.

Right.

Incredibly disruptive.

It may even put grocers out of the ability to compete on E commerce depending on where their margins are.

I actually lived through the actual gas buddy advent when I was in the convenience store industry.

Price and fuel.

This is going to be even harder for grocers.

Right.

And I think it's.

You're going to find that it's going to split kind of the innovative thinkers on how to leverage this from the old school stalwarts who kind of refuse to change.

And the winners are going to be the ones who really lean in and take hold of this, you know, AI capabilities and start to embed that within their site.

So I think it's the tip of the iceberg.

I really took notice when this kind of technology was available now and I think it's going to set a course for us going forward.

Wow, Chad, that's really interesting.

Particularly as well I don't know if you saw but just in the last 24 hours Consumer Reports put out a report about Instacart's pricing and how you know it's very varies widely across.

They surveyed like 400 different people and all 400 different people had a different price for specific items.

It was crazy.

And so like what you're getting at is a real need case here of price transparency and generative AI enables that.

So that's, that's really interesting.

And, and shout out to Michael and Matt at grocery deals.

They're gonna love, they're gonna love that drop for them.

So they're gonna, they're gonna be stoked when they see this.

But, but an I'm curious, like what's, what's, what's your take on the, the hot technology of the year?

I, I was with Chad where, I mean agentic search and agentic commerce was, you know, an obvious one.

But I, I went with electronic shelf labels and the reason that I did was one, we saw Walmart decide in early in the year we're going to roll these out to all of our stores.

And once Walmart does something, the rest of the industry is typically very, very fast to follow.

However, it really didn't dawn on me how pervasive this technology was, Chris, until we were at the Spartan Nash conference in July and you and I talked to retailers that had, you know, four store locations, they were in the middle of Nebraska or Ohio.

Yeah.

And when we talked to them about electronic shelf labels or any in store technology really, they had already deployed these shelf labels.

One, for the pricing transparency that Chad just talked about in grocery being very important to getting their, their customers to come back to them time and time again.

But then two, for the labor savings.

They, they don't have access to labor in these smaller rural communities that they used to.

And so this saved them time, it saved them money and it really allowed their staff to focus on the customers in their community, which is what sets them apart and what's what keeps customers coming to them versus you know, the big box retailer or grocer down the street.

So that really, that really changed my opinion of how doable this technology is.

We've heard for a long time that it's expensive or it's hard to make pencil, but if a rural retailer is pushing forward with this technology, I think and Walmart on the other end of the spectrum, I think it's something that we're really going to start to see in more and more places in the years ahead.

Yeah, that's a great point.

You know, that conference was really wild because like you mentioned it like they were very laser focused on their biggest line on that income statement, which was stored labor in a way that we had never really heard from the big guys before, even though they probably are too.

And some of them, to your point, and some of them were literally on a mission to God from God.

A mission from God to put electronic shelf labels in their store.

Like it was, it was wild to hear them talk about it.

So.

Well, I don't, I mean for me, my, my technology of the year, it's a gentic AI, but which I think is where Chad was going too.

He's like, you know, I want to put a little wrinkle on this, but for me it's agentic AI on the operational side of the business.

Like how do you run your warehouses better?

How do you inform your stores of the next best actions they need to take?

How do you run your inventory management more productively?

That's where I think people should be experimenting first as opposed to venturing into the realm of the consumer facing experiences.

Because I think the jury's still out on, you know, how much, how many of us are going to shop this way and what the impact of that is going to be in the long term.

So, so that's, that's my plug.

But agentic AI, it's, you know, to chat to your point.

I think it's what you're saying too.

It's like kind of hard not to go with it in some ways.

Yeah.

100.