Neeraj Tolmare

I analyzed retail AI performance in 2025 and found a gap most people miss: (PS what do you think of retail Vecna?) #Retail has some of the clearest use cases for #AI - discovery, merchandising, pricing, supply chain, labor. At first glance, 2025 looked like the year retailers finally embraced AI: announcements everywhere, press releases, and new tools launching every month. And the numbers followed - During the 2025 holiday season:  • AI-driven U.S. e-commerce traffic jumped roughly 758% year over year.   • On Cyber Monday alone, AI-referred traffic grew around 670%.   • The signal is directional - discovery is moving upstream. But when I stepped back and looked at where AI was actually changing behavior, the story shifted. Retail still trails finance and telecom in overall AI adoption, and that part is well documented. The issue isn’t vision, it’s friction: physical operations are messy, margins are thin, and ROI takes longer to materialize.   But behavior doesn’t wait for internal readiness. This is how all of the big players acted in 2025: 𝟭. 𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗽𝘂𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗱 𝗔𝗜 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 - Walmart rolled out Wally for merchants and Sparky for shoppers, tying internal workflows and consumer-facing help into a broader agent strategy, and even enabling ChatGPT-based checkout flows. - Target embedded AI into merchandise ideation, third-party seller vetting, in-platform shopping, and holiday gifting, making AI part of how assortment gets built and sold. - Amazon expanded agentic tools for sellers and marketers that monitor inventory, analyze demand, optimize shipments, and reshape how shopper intent is captured. 𝟮. 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗽𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸𝗼𝘂𝘁 - Etsy and Shopify enabled AI-native checkout paths, allowing shoppers to move from conversational discovery to purchase without ever touching a traditional product page. Intent no longer needed a site visit to convert. 𝟯. 𝗜𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 - Wayfair let shoppers generate AI-driven interior scenes and buy directly from them. - Stitch Fix introduced visual try-ons that showed real customers what outfits would look like before committing. - Levi Strauss & Co.’s laid the groundwork for a company-wide agentic framework spanning operations, IT, and human workflows. 𝟰. 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗮𝗱𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗔𝗜-𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀 - Best Buy used AI for customer support, personalized marketing, and product search. - The Home Depot Depot embedded generative AI across millions of product pages to answer questions and improve search. Across categories and formats, the pattern was consistent: AI moved from being assistive to being agentic - and that is the direction I forecast will take the lead in 2026 🤔 Tell me, what part of the retail workflow do you think humans shouldn’t be doing anymore?

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The company has identified more than 35 internal AI use cases spanning supply chain, merchandising, marketing and call centers, as well as customer-facing and omnichannel functions https://lnkd.in/eYcKFeab Macy’s Media Network grew revenue 12.5% in Q4. #retail #Pymnts #AI PYMNTS

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AI integration in the workplace underscores a critical truth: efficiency is not enough without discernment. AI boosts productivity, yet it cannot replicate human discernment, the ability to draw on emotional intelligence, context and a clear sense of what truly matters and in complex environments, professionals rely on discernment to read subtle cues, ask the right questions and navigate interpersonal dynamics with nuances. The most effective leaders blend AI’s analytical power with intuitive judgment, ensuring that technology amplifies human insights: AI enhances productivity, but human discernment remains essential for insightful, high‑stakes decision‑making in organizations. In short, AI can accelerate output, but only human discernment can safeguard decision quality. #leadership #aiintegration #discernment

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Retailers have never had less certainty about what's actually on their shelves — and never needed more. RADAR is the RFID based perpetual inventory platform built to close that gap, giving retailers a continuous, real-time view of inventory across every store, without the labor drag of manual cycle counts. Most retail inventory systems tell you what should be there. RADAR tells you what is there — right now, down to the SKU and the fixture. Using a network of connected overhead RFID readers and machine learning, RADAR reads product locations continuously throughout the day, turning the sales floor and back-of-house into a live, searchable map of inventory. No handheld scanning. No periodic cycle counts. No stale data by the time a store associate — or a customer — needs the answer. I am looking forward to introducing RADAR to new European retailers and partners at the NRF Retail's Big Show Europe tomorrow. As a startup we are focusing our efforts on our products not our booth (its pretty green!) but come by Hall 4 - ST-56 in the startup zone and have some candy. You can talk to Jasmine Harris, Spencer Hewett and myself and hear about out 1700 + store rollout so far in North America and what our plans are for Europe. Hats off to all the hard working booth building teams out there. It's a lot of work. #rfid #rainrfid  #rfidrocks  #rfiddontlie #rfiq #whatisyourrfiq #onlyrfid

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National Retail Federation’s Retail AI Trends 2025 is directionally informative; however, like nearly all AI surveys, it highlights future intent and self-reported progress without discussion of critical implementation dynamics.⁣ ⁣ Two considerations:⁣ ⁣ 𝟏) 𝐀𝐈 𝐠𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲⁣ Boards oversee AI through risk, controls, and accountability, not individual use cases; however, the gap is that different applications of AI (forecasting models, GenAI assistants, agentic systems) require different evidence, controls, and escalation thresholds under the same governance umbrella. In my Board discussions, that level of differentiation, critical for effective oversight, is still nascent.⁣ ⁣ 𝟐) 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬⁣ In a large portion of AI deployments (certainly for the highest priority use cases cited in this report), time spent aggregating, normalizing, and repairing data directly impacts the report's most dominant AI concerns of cost and model performance. This is like worrying about fuel efficiency and engine performance while ignoring the quality of the fuel going in.⁣ ⁣ These surveys offer important industry benchmarking, but the conversation benefits when paired with frontline implementation experience ... a perspective that rounds out today's AI discourse. At World Wide Technology, our AI implementation depth and partnerships with leaders such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, NVIDIA, Dell Technologies, and Intel Corporation help bridge this gap between industry sentiment and execution reality. #AIImplementation #RetailAI

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CCI's framing here is exactly right, and I'd add one thing from the digital side of the house. AI makes FIND easy. CHASE is where the organization gets to win. The signal for a breakout item usually shows up in digital well before the buy has to commit: site search volume, PDP conversion, notify-me requests on a sold-out color, add-to-cart velocity on a size that's already gone. The encouraging part is that most retailers are already sitting on all of it. The head start exists before anyone buys a new tool. The brands that turn that head start into units are the ones who pair it with a standing cadence across digital, merchandising, and planning, with someone in the room who can move inventory dollars that week. Detection plus decision rights is the whole engine.

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When two of the most influential CEOs in the world step aside in the middle of the AI transition, the change reaches every leadership role, including yours. Within weeks, Doug McMillon announced his retirement from Walmart and James Quincey his exit as CEO of Coca-Cola. Both run companies deep in an AI build-out, and each concluded that the next stretch belongs to someone else. In my work with leaders, the same concern comes up once the door closes: Am I still the right person for what is coming? It's an honest fear, and even the most accomplished people feel it. The unease runs well past the executive floor, too. Employees share it, and so do young people at the very start of their careers, something research confirms. And it's okay to be concerned, since none of us has lived through change at this speed before. We don't have to stay there, though, as long as we stay humble enough to admit how much there is to learn and bold enough to step toward it instead of away from it. The answer was never about outrunning the machines on their own ground. Technical Fluency has become the baseline. Leaders need enough command of AI and data to ask the right questions and weigh the answers that come back. What truly sets a leader apart, and what keeps them relevant, are the Human Power Skills. These are human-specific capabilities that no machine can replicate. Consider rolling out a system that will change half the jobs on a team. The numbers may make the case, yet what people need from their leader is honesty about the uncertainty and the judgment to lead them through the change rather than around it. That is human work, and it's becoming the rarest currency in business. Relevance isn't fixed by your age or your title. Any one of us who keeps developing these human capabilities can stay relevant, whatever the technology does next, because the next decade will belong to those who master them. As AI takes on more, how are you building and strengthening your Human Power Skills? *********** If you’d like to learn more about the other Human Power Skills and how to develop them, you might be interested in my new book “HUMA: HUman Leadership + MAchine Enhanced.” It’ll be released globally on June 23. More information available in the comments section below.

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Industry Analysts Look for Trends in Gold and Retail Data What a fun conversation at the Atlanta Jewelry Show with Rob Bates, Paul Zimnisky, CFA, David Siminski and Andrea Hill. We covered a lot of ground — gold, the economy, consumer spending, inventory, margins and what retailers should be thinking about as we head into the balance of the year. My message to retailers was pretty simple: Know your customers. Know your numbers. Your data is a gold mine. There will always be things outside of our control. The best retailers stay disciplined, manage their inventory, protect their margins and make decisions based on what their own data is telling them. Great conversation with some very smart industry people! Rob Bates shares the entire discussion in his substack The Jewelry Wire. https://lnkd.in/gHzMW3JC

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