THE RETAIL 2026 PREDICTION FORECAST | Fast Five Shorts

What is one headline you predict for 2026?

Chad, let's go to you first.

So I gotta say there's some pressure on this one because last year I used this Omni to talk about Target and what would most likely be leadership changes in 2025.

Sure enough, in August, Brian, Brian Cornell announced he'd step down.

So what to do here?

Like, it, it felt like it needed to be something open, AI related, something ChatGPT.

The obvious one is, you know, advertisers flood as ChatGPT introduces ads to its free tier.

Right.

And then, you know, maybe you get a twofer here, like as the agentic commerce does accelerate, when it will, maybe OpenAI creates its own payment platform.

Now you can use ChatGPT, pay for your AI agents to do all your holiday shopping for you or something like that.

But you know, steamrolling ahead on that.

That, yeah, we're starting to see some announcements with Visa jumping in there and Amazon and some other ones too.

So I think those are great call outs.

Chris, what is yours headline for 2026?

I kind of tease it before, but for me, I think, I think, I think and to your point about Starbucks and the laughable headline, I think, I think Starbucks is going to do an about face on this whole.

Like we can't have a coffee shop without seating in it.

Like that just, I think doesn't make sense operationally.

They're gonna, at some point they're gonna avail a new mobile order and Ghost Cafe concept where that's just what they're focused on, of getting those orders into people's hands as quickly as possible because they need the throughput, they really do.

And that's the only way I can conceive of doing it as opposed to like a full scale redesign of their stores, which is gonna take time and a ton of money.

So I, I think, right, we'll see that at some point.

I don't know if we'll see it this year technically, but I think we'll see it at some point.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.

We'll certainly see the impact of focusing more on these store redesigns that they're doing and if the investment is going to be worth it for them or if they need to pivot and go more to just the Ghost Kitchen model that you're talking about too.

Chris?

Well, I, I'm closer to Chad on this one for my, my tomorrow's headlines today, but the headline I'm most excited about seeing in 2026 is agent influence Shopping around the Black Friday Cyber Monday and holiday season of 2026.

I, I believe we will see that at least double, if not triple compared to the stats that we saw this year because I think it's another a hold a whole additional year now that we've got people familiarized with using these agents to do their shopping.

And I think as they start to, to use that for things outside of just shopping, for making appointments, for doing other things, I think we'll start to see an increase, hopefully with payment options like Chad's talking about to make those gift buying shopping experiences less stressful, you know, and, and more impactful, especially as the deal season seemed to get stretched out this year.

Black Friday week lasted two weeks, it seemed like.

So those agents will be really helpful, I think, with people making sure that they're getting the right prices and potentially even doing things like price matching and stuff on their behalf next year.

Wow.

All right, so, and, and all in.

On, all in on a gentic AI from Ann.

That's the key takeaway from this show so far.