Hello Omni Talk Fans! I spent three full days at NRF 2026 last week, conducting, watching, or reading recaps of over 20 interviews with retail and technology executives from various sectors, including grocery, home improvement, beauty, warehouse club, and pharmacy retailers. These interviews either took place with me personally or on the Big Show stage. While each conversation revealed unique insights, four consistent themes stood out, themes that fundamentally challenge how retailers have approached operations, technology, and strategy for decades. What became clear is that the playbook that once worked, even as little as 18 months ago, has reached its expiration date, and the retailers who will thrive in 2026 and beyond will not be the ones with the most sophisticated plans, but rather those who adapt the fastest to the permanent structural shifts they are about to face.
There’s an old adage that I love: “Enlightened trial and error succeeds over planning every time.” And, buying into this philosophy won’t just come in handy. It will become a necessary condition for success.
AI Orchestration Is Separating Winners from Wishful Thinkers
The AI conversation at NRF 2026 bore little resemblance to last year’s, let’s just call them, abstractions (I’m being nice). Executives no longer spoke of potential or possibility. Instead, they shared how they transformed specific workflows and achieved concrete savings, and, perhaps most importantly, what they also got wrong.
In other words, they got real.
For example, Spreetail’s Chief Merchandising Officer, Owen Carr, as part of a stage panel moderated by SPS Commerce VP Retail, Tony DiPaolo, delivered perhaps the most memorable AI cautionary tale. Carr spoke of how his team attempted to use AI to automate weekly business reviews across brands and channels. “We actually had the product once where AI completely hallucinated,” Carr explained. The system generated a detailed performance analysis that “sounded so official, you could have presented it to your board, and they’d be like, sounds good.”
If only the data were real.
However, the lesson Carr espoused onstage, despite all this, wasn’t to abandon AI but rather to match application complexity to capability maturity. Spreetail ultimately found success with simple applications, such as verifying that hero images display correctly across 20 different sales channels. “That simple AI usage was able to drive tremendous content adherence and fidelity improvement,” Carr noted, something his team achieved after learning to “audit AI with AI and do it again and again” until reaching acceptable accuracy baselines.
Throughout the week, there were a myriad of other examples of smart retailers leveraging AI to orchestrate, more so than to automate, what were previously tedious manual processes.
Take Sam’s Club and Home Depot.
Sam’s Club’s Chief Merchandising Officer Julie Barber described transforming assortment optimization from “weeks and weeks with spreadsheets” to “20 minutes” using agentic AI. This time compression, she argued, enabled fundamentally different strategic approaches, i.e. “testing more ideas, correcting mistakes faster, responding to emerging trends before they peak.”
Moreover, Home Depot’s CIO Angie Brown put everything in even blunter terms: “It’s not time to sit back and wait,” she said, while discussing Home Depot’s expanded Google Gemini partnership and Magic Apron in-store pilots that reflect what she called an “agentic commerce strategy” that solves previously impossible problems.
Let that sink in for a bit. AI, if orchestrated correctly, makes the previously impossible possible.
Still not convinced? Then look at Costco.
Costco’s AVP of Retail Media Mark Williamson echoed a similar tune to Brown. He argued that the human impossibility is making AI a necessity: “Personalization at scale cannot be done by humans. It needs to be done by machines.” This orchestration approach, i.e. using AI to apply human-defined values at machine scale, is what separates genuine transformation from your run-of-the-mill technology deployments.
Omnichannel Precision at Scale Requires Purpose-Built Solutions
The omnichannel discussion at NRF 2026 also matured beyond channel integration platitudes into operational precision challenges that expose whether retailers understand their unique fulfillment economics. For example, what works for general merchandise catastrophically fails for grocery. What succeeds for beauty services creates chaos for home improvement.
Strongpoint CEO Jacob Tveraabak crystallized this sentiment when he relayed his “jogging shoe picking solution” critique when I interviewed him. Retailers attempting to adapt general merchandise fulfillment to grocery fail because, according to him, “What’s unique about groceries is the volume going through, the velocity of sales. When you’re shopping groceries online, you’re not shopping one or two items like most people do when they shop shoes, but you shop maybe 50, 60 items for next-day delivery.” This volume differential requires purpose-built technology, not adapted solutions.
FairPrice Group’s Store of Tomorrow is the perfect example to validate this principle. According to FairPrice CEO Vipul Chawla, the introduction of smart shopping trolleys has driven “70-80% basket size increases” within the store.
Why?
Because the carts enabled customer behavior impossible with traditional carts. According to Chawla, the carts help customers manage their shopping lists in real-time, locate products more easily, see all the promotions available to them, and enjoy the benefit of speeding through checkout. A remarkable 82% of FairPrice’s Store of Tomorrow shoppers elect to use self-checkout.
However, the story isn’t all gumdrops and rainbows. Achieving successful precision at scale can also expose critical infrastructure gaps along the journey.
Lowe’s India CTO Ankur Mittal, for instance, revealed a sobering statistic about mid-sized retailers’ capabilities. When I asked him what percentage of mid-sized retailers or below are truly omnichannel, where item, price, and promo are 100% unified via APIs rather than housed in separate channel systems, he believed the number was “going to be in single digits.” This gap represents both competitive vulnerability for laggards and an opportunity for technology providers, enabling rapid capability deployment.
The Great Rewiring: Tariffs Killed Optimization-First Logistics
The most profound shift discussed across interviews involved fundamental supply chain restructuring driven by tariffs and geopolitical risk. The optimization-first logistics model, minimizing costs through concentrated sourcing and lean inventory, collapsed under tariff pressures, revealing brittleness disguised as efficiency.
“Just-in-time has given way to just-in-case,” as Dematic Market Development Director Kim Baudry likes to say.
Spreetail’s Carr quantified the impact with brutal clarity: “We’re a top 100 importer in the US, and (have) tens of millions of extra tariffs to pay . . . If you look at the top 500 baby items sold in the US and compare them year over year, they’re up in price by about 22 percent. But if you actually look at the top sellers now, they’re actually only up in the single digits.”
Carr’s explanation? Manufacturers’ de-specing of products, changing features, and introducing replacements to avoid tariffs led to rapid SKU shifts.
All of which has created new competitive metrics.
“The brands right now that are growing in market share and winning are the ones that have the greatest percentage of their assortment generating their sales this year, that’s fresh within a 12-month new assortment,” Carr explained. His benchmark: “10 to 20 percent” of sales from items launched in the last year. “The brands we think are in a lot of trouble? Only 1 percent of their sales this year have come from items they’ve newly launched.” Winners like Shark Ninja achieve “20-30 percent of their sales from items they’ve launched this year.”
Martin Bailie, former Lidl UK COO and now a Senior Adviser for Vusion, contextualized the pressure: “Moving stock globally is now over $1.2 trillion (per year), up 5.4%.” Cost increases such as these demand efficiency offsets, but optimization-first approaches, as Bailie pointed out, could actually end up concentrating the risk even more so and therefore prove counterproductive. “How do you save 5.4% on your movement of stock and your inventory? You got to find it with technology. You got to find it with AI,” Bailie told me.
Finally, this rewiring also extends beyond tariff mitigation into fundamental supplier relationship restructuring. Canadian Tire’s Vice President of Supply Chain planning Jeff Szabo, in the very same session as Carr, described “the great rewiring of trade” where “buying organizations are onboarding new trade partners, new suppliers faster than ever with more velocity” driven by “macroeconomic factors driving the need to find new suppliers.”
This supplier diversification accepts higher per-unit costs to reduce catastrophic risk, signaling what is becoming a recurring theme of this article, the end of “optimization-first” approaches, and in this case optimization-first logistics.
Speed of Adaptation Trumps Strategic Sophistication
With all that said, probably the most consistent theme across all the interviews was the idea that adaptation speed would start to overwhelm and overtake strategic planning sophistication. Five-year plans are going the way of the dodo, replaced instead by compressed decision cycles and a willingness to accept imperfection in order to keep moving forward.
Bailie’s framing of this issue particularly captured this urgency: “Nine months in modern retail equals 9 years,” Bailie said.
He described a UK retailer spending nine months on pilots while “everybody else has shifted. And when they see the innovation here and seeing all the brand names that their competitors have, they’re suddenly like we’re way behind in nine months.” His diagnosis: “The greatest threat to retail today is about that execution gap. Innovation is a distraction without flawless execution.”
But this execution imperative requires a Moneyball-like philosophy of abandoning the assumptions that heretofore enabled historical success. RONA Divisional Vice President of Distribution Robert Brace described letting go of century-old distribution rules for unpredictable pro customers: “If they need rooftop delivery of shingles and they need that tomorrow for a job, to say you missed your cutoff window by a couple of hours is not really acceptable. Their buying patterns are heavily driven by the weather.” Growth, he articulated, required accepting operational chaos that standardization-obsessed distribution models couldn’t accommodate.
“We may be accepting a little less on the precision side from a project than we normally would,” Brace said. “There’s a term that our IT group often uses called MVP or minimum viable product. I really don’t like the term, but it’s something that we choose to accept in an effort to advance our business.”
Oftentimes, the 90% solution beats 100% solutions delivered too slowly to matter, and especially in this era in which AI has placed a newfound premium on the idea of perfect being the enemy of good.
The Adaptation Imperative
For the retailers out there, the implications of this article just about write themselves.
Your AI deployment strategy should emphasize simple, well-defined applications with built-in verification over complex analytical ambitions; your omnichannel investments must be purpose-built for your specific operational realities; your supply chain planning should abandon optimization-first models that concentrate risk in favor of diversified sourcing that accepts higher per-unit costs to prevent catastrophic disruption; and, most critically, your organization must compress decision cycles and accept 90% solutions delivered this quarter over 100% solutions arriving next year.
Because there is one more all-important rub to call out, and that is that the executives I quoted above are reporting on their current competitive realities, not their aspirational futures. Many of them have already pivoted their organizations in this direction.
The question for everyone else is whether the gap of legacy processes and beliefs is already too wide to close via a “what got us here will get us there” execution mindset, or if quick, immediate action and newfound technological religion can still help them to capture the compounding advantages that separate adaptation from obsolescence.
Be careful out there,
– Chris and the entire Omni Talk team
About the Author
Chris WaltonChris Walton is the Co-CEO of Omni Talk and the former Vice President of Target’s Store of the Future project. He is recognized as one of the top retail experts globally, with deep insights into innovation, digital transformation, and modern commerce strategies.
*This article was written in partnership with SPS Commerce*
Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.