The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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Why Your AI ROI Is a Leadership Gap Wrapped in a Technology Costume.

I’ll admit something: my grocery cart has a lot more store brands in it than it used to. More than ever. And it’s fine. When I confessed this on mic in Nashville, Brandon Rael didn’t miss a beat: “Tastes just as good.”

Here’s the part that got me thinking. Private label just hit a record 23.8% unit share, and store brands barely advertise. S

o how are shoppers finding them?

My guess is a lot of people are typing something like “what’s a cheaper alternative to my favorite national brand that still tastes good?” into an AI tool and following whatever comes back.

If that’s right, national brands are losing sales in conversations they can’t see.

That’s the invisible lost sale, and it’s where I started a live Data Blades podcast conversation at Shoptalk Fall with Brandon Rael and Rupa Amin from Perficient. (Casey still hasn’t forgiven me for going without her.) Perficient sponsored this episode, and we built the conversation around their new 2026 State of the Industry report for Retail and Consumer.

SPONSOR: Perficient

State of the Industry: Retail & Consumer Report

Can you guess what percentage of retail leaders can’t define ROI from AI projects?

Drawing on insights from 50 retail and consumer decision-makers and Perficient’s industry practitioners, this State of the Industry report answers that question and more. Explore the trends, tensions, and signals shaping the future of the industry and learn how organizations are approaching AI, balancing innovation with execution, and preparing for emerging buying behaviors such as agentic commerce.

See where your organization’s priorities and challenges stand with peers across the industry. Read the report today to learn more!

Agentic commerce is small and growing fast.

Brandon grounded things right away. About 85% of retail still happens in stores. E-commerce is 10 to 15%, social commerce 1 to 2%. So AI shopping agents are touching a slice of a slice right now.

Then there’s Adobe’s number: AI-referred traffic to retail sites is up 393%. Yes, small numbers make big percentages. I said as much on air. It’s still the kind of growth curve you don’t want to discover late.

Brandon’s prep list is unglamorous:

• tech specs,

• reviews,

• product attributes,

• and more data rather than less.

As he put it, an agent shops without emotion and works from the data you give it. If your product data has holes, the agent moves on and you never hear about it.

64% can’t prove it’s working.

This was the number I came for. Perficient surveyed 50 director-level and above retail and consumer leaders, and 64% don’t have reliable data on their own AI ROI.

I laughed when she said it, then winced, because two retailers on a panel I moderated the week before had told me nearly the same thing. The process they tried to automate with AI turned out to be a process nobody actually followed.

Rupa’s diagnosis was the best line of the conversation: a leadership gap wrapped in a technology costume.

Leaders haven’t decided which part of the business AI should fix, or how they’ll measure it.

Perficient even has a customer project whose name sums up the whole problem. I’m not explaining it here. Go to 13:16 in the episode and find out who Bob is.

Almost half are funding AI in the wrong order.

Brandon’s fix starts with people, then priorities, then technology. Get leaders in a room, agree on the three to five areas that matter most, tie each one to an ROI case, and only then put AI into those processes.

And do the data work first. “If the foundation of the house isn’t set, the house is gonna fall down the hill,” he said.

He’s worked with retailers still running AS400s on 30 to 40 years of tech debt.

Rupa added the line I’d hand every conference attendee on the way out: it’s easy to get fired up at these events and go home planning to change the world. Start with a hard look at what you already have. Every platform you own is adding AI. Your job is to get your data ready for it.

Retail Agent Con - November 17, 2026

Join Us for Retail Agent Con - November 17, 2026!

Explore how AI agents fit into retail work at Retail Agent Con, a live virtual event on November 17, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern, produced by IHL Group with ClearSight AI.

Join retail leaders like Glenn Allison of Tractor Supply, Scott Saeger of David’s Bridal and Justin Emig of Artisan Lane Furniture, then Dr. Janet Sherlock on the organizational changes required for agents and humans to work together, analysts like Greg Buzek and Jerry Sheldon of IHL Group and Retail Razor’s Ricardo Belmar, for practical conversations about agents in merchandising, order management, inventory control, store systems, and more.

Retailers attend free, sponsorships and individual tickets are available as well. Learn more at www.retailagentcon.com.

Where I landed.

The retailers who win with agentic commerce will be the ones who can show their work. That comes down to three unglamorous things.

• One owner per AI project. Rupa’s rule: when something fails and a phone call has to be made, that call goes to the owner, not the committee.

• A baseline you take this quarter. Rupa’s Monday-morning advice: start now. Pick a KPI, pick a process, add AI, and take a baseline snapshot. A year from now, that snapshot is the difference between an answer for the board and an activity report.

• Product data an agent can read. The AI shopping for your customer won’t fill in the blanks for you.

None of this gets a standing ovation at a conference keynote. The board will ask about all three anyway.

Watch, listen, subscribe, and read.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 17: “64% of Retail Leaders Can't Prove Their AI ROI.”

Listen wherever you get podcasts or watch on our YouTube channel or Spotify.

You can find Perficient’s 2026 State of the Industry report here.

Your turn.

If you sell B2B, jump to 09:20, where Rupa explains what reps need to say now that buyers arrive having already asked AI.

This is the second of four episodes we recorded live and in-person at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. If this was useful, subscribe so the next one lands in your inbox.

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Leave a comment

Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the innovators, the disruptors, and the bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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My Question Ran as Long as a Strategy Meeting.

At Shoptalk Fall, I asked Brendan Witcher a question. A long one.

I started with how everyone overgeneralizes about retail. Then I wandered into department stores, where apparel and housewares might as well be different businesses. Then grocery, where the wine section and the shelf-stable milk aisle don’t engage a shopper the same way. Then I took a swing at tech vendors who tell every retailer to “do this for your customers” without asking which customers.

Brendan let me finish. Then he pointed out that I’d asked my question in about the amount of time most people spend talking strategy in a strategy meeting about the topic I just asked about. Fifteen minutes, “or whatever it was.”

Fair, and guilty. And he turned it into the point of the whole conversation:

Most teams walk into those 15 minutes expecting to walk out with the answer. But is it a strategy?

Who I was talking to.

Brendan is Global VP of Product & Content at Shoptalk. Before that he was one of Forrester’s best-known retail analysts, and we’ve known each other longer than either of us wants to count. We recorded live in the Rethink Retail Creator Studio in Nashville on day one of the conference. Casey couldn’t make the trip, and she still hasn’t forgiven me for going without her.

Retail Agent Con - November 17, 2026

Join Us for Retail Agent Con - November 17, 2026!

Explore how AI agents fit into retail work at Retail Agent Con, a live virtual event on November 17, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern, produced by IHL Group with ClearSight AI.

Join retail leaders like Glenn Allison of Tractor Supply, Scott Saeger of David’s Bridal and Justin Emig of Artisan Lane Furniture, then Dr. Janet Sherlock on the organizational changes required for agents and humans to work together, analysts like Greg Buzek and Jerry Sheldon of IHL Group and Retail Razor’s Ricardo Belmar, for practical conversations about agents in merchandising, order management, inventory control, store systems, and more.

Retailers attend free, sponsorships and individual tickets are available as well. Learn more at www.retailagentcon.com.

“Strategically lazy.”

Here’s how Brendan answered my marathon question:

He wasn’t calling anyone dumb. His read is that some leaders stop thinking because they feel they’ve earned it. Thirty years in, they already know.

His example is a stat like “98% of people care about sustainability” getting turned straight into a strategic plan. There’s one check in your own data that usually tells a very different story. I’m going to let Brendan explain that one himself, starting at 16:07. It’s worth the click. Trust me.

The retail media math.

I’ll admit this part hurt a little. Brendan’s numbers: Amazon owns 76% of retail media. Walmart owns 6%. That’s 82% between two companies. Every other grocer, specialty chain, and department store with a media network pitch deck is fighting over 18%.

“Everyone’s talking about retail media, so we should do retail media” is exactly the sentence he means.

Retail media works for some things and simply doesn’t for others. Do the math on your slice before somebody books the vendor demo.

Ideas vs. strategy.

Everyone’s got ideas. Brendan has one right now. So do you. His line: “The difference between an idea and a strategy is a strategy’s actually been worked out and vetted.” My favorite bit is how he described the vetting: “foresight that’s trying to be hindsight.”

I said on the podcast that an idea doesn’t come with an execution plan and a strategy should.

Brendan’s version is shorter.

Every parent eventually looks at their kid and says it: think it through.

He wants more leaders saying those three words to themselves and their teams, then leaving the silence there. Joey from Friends got a mention. You’ll get it when you listen (or better yet, watch) the full episode.

Where I landed.

Brendan called it: most retailers outside the top two should run the 18% math before they stand up a retail media network. Some will still say yes. Good. At least they thought it through.

I also think “we don’t know yet” needs to become an acceptable way to end a meeting.

Brendan says strategic laziness hits an all-time high when something is new, because the pressure to have an answer is highest.

Sound like any AI agent meeting you’ve been in lately?

And I’m keeping his other line: “Knowledge is the absence of questions.” I told him I was stealing it. I meant it.

Watch, listen, subscribe.

🎙️ Season 2, Episode 10 of Retail Transformers: “Strategically Lazy: Why Retail Strategy Fails”

If you only have five minutes, jump to 24:06. Brendan lays out the agentic commerce question he thinks will define the industry, and it sits with the tech companies building the agents your customers will use.

The full episode of Retail Transformers is available now everywhere you find podcasts and on our YouTube channel.

Your turn.

If this one hit, forward it to someone you know who’s cutting the strategy part of the strategy meeting too short. And if you’re not subscribed yet, that’s the button below.

This is the first of four episodes we recorded live and in-person at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville in the RETHINK Retail Creator Studio. Be sure to subscribe so the next one lands in your inbox.

Subscribe now

Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

Subscribe now

Your Order Data Is the Better AI Bet.

Quick question. When was the last time you called Amazon about an order?

I can’t remember either. When Chris Deck asked that question in our podcast studio tent at RetailClub AI Festival, Casey and I answered at the same time: you don’t need to. And that was the whole point he was making.

Chris is the Founder & CEO of Deck Commerce, an order management system company, and he joined Casey and me in Huntington Beach for our latest Data Blades podcast. Full disclosure: Deck Commerce also sponsors the episode.

I came out of it with a list of things I’d want every brand to check before Black Friday.

SPONSOR: Deck Commerce

Deck Commerce is an order management and orchestration platform built for brands where ecommerce growth has created real operational complexity.

Deck sits between the channels where customers shop and the systems that manage inventory, fulfillment, and financials, helping brands intelligently orchestrate what happens after an order is placed.

The result is simpler operations, better customer experiences, and the ability to scale without constantly rebuilding the commerce stack.

Learn more!

The order that shipped in five boxes.

Here’s the number that makes the case for prioritizing AI in order management.

Chris’s team took a couple weeks of an apparel brand’s inventory and sales data and ran it through an AI simulation that tested different order orchestration choices for every order. In a short amount of time they had the answer: 3X fewer split shipments and 4 fewer zones of shipping distance.

Translation: an order that went out in five boxes could have gone out in two.

Every extra zone costs money, so the savings are obvious. Chris cares more about the customer getting their stuff faster in fewer boxes, and so do I. Nobody has ever opened their fourth box of the day from a single order and thought, “What a delightful brand.”

What I like even more is how careful he is with it.

He calls the tool version one of agentic order orchestration. A person reviews what the AI recommends and decides what to change. The agents get more control once people trust the results.

Scale breaks the stuff around the order.

Casey asked Chris what scale means at peak, when you run the same process thousands of times on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. His answer speaks volumes.

Going from 1,000 orders to 5,000 means everything around the order has to keep up:

• finance still has to close the month,

• loyalty points have to post,

• payments have to be captured,

• and the customer needs to know where their order is in real time.

Miss any of those and you get the outcome Casey can’t stand. And when I Say can’t stand, I mean it may qualify has her number one irritation in all of ecommerce (well, maybe after tech franken-stacks, but that’s another newsletter):

a chatbot added to the website so customers can ask where their package went.

Chris called that solving the symptom. If the order shows up fast, on time, and the customer gets updates along the way, they don’t call.

They don’t cancel.

See: Amazon.

You already own the data.

The part I keep coming back to is how little a brand has to buy to get started. Order management already holds what Chris called a treasure trove of first-party transactional data. Order history. Return history. Where inventory sits right now.

Deck Commerce recently launched agents that put that data in front of people who need it.

A call center rep taps one button and sees whether the person on the phone is a VIP with a long order history or a serial returner. Same idea for inventory: where is it, and should different quantities sit in different locations?

A brand doesn’t need a new channel or a new shopping journey to start. The data is already in the order management system.

Retail Agent Con - November 17, 2026

Join Us for Retail Agent Con - November 17, 2026!

Explore how AI agents fit into retail work at Retail Agent Con, a live virtual event on November 17, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern, produced by IHL Group with ClearSight AI.

Join retail leaders like Glenn Allison of Tractor Supply, Scott Saeger of David’s Bridal and Justin Emig of Artisan Lane Furniture, then Dr. Janet Sherlock on the organizational changes required for agents and humans to work together, analysts like Greg Buzek and Jerry Sheldon of IHL Group and Retail Razor’s Ricardo Belmar, for practical conversations about agents in merchandising, order management, inventory control, store systems, and more.

Retailers attend free, sponsorships and individual tickets are available as well. Learn more at www.retailagentcon.com.

Where I landed.

Everyone at RetailClub wanted to talk about AI shopping agents. Fine. I’m still waiting for personalization to work at scale, so forgive me if I don’t hold my breath for agents to do all of my shopping. (And then there’s the trust issue with <ahem> some of the vendors delivering those agents - but that’s also the topic of a future newsletter).

If I’m a retail leader with a limited AI budget, I’m spending it on order orchestration first.

It’s measurable, it runs on data you already have (and might be the only data you currently have that’s clean enough to reliably use with AI) - the payoff shows up as fewer boxes, lower shipping costs, and customers who never need to call you.

That’s a board slide I’d want to present.

And if your answer to “where’s my order?” is a better chatbot, you’ve built a nicer way to apologize.

There’s one more piece I’m leaving for the episode. Yes, it’s a podcast after all - you need to listen (or watch) for the whole story.

Chris makes the case that order management is “the engine of growth for the next wave of commerce” and breaks it into four parts that loop back on each other. Jump to 18:18 to hear him lay it out.

Casey also tells a store-to-store transfer story that every merchant who has ever fought a markdown will recognize instantly.

Watch, listen, subscribe.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 16: “One Order, Five Boxes: How AI Order Management Cut It to Two.”

Listen wherever you get podcasts or watch on our YouTube channel or Spotify.

Your turn.

Next time you’re asking your board for AI investment dollars, consider whether you’re better off spending that investment on operational functions, say, order management, versus diving straight into customer facing agents. You might find the impact on your business AND customer experience is even more appealing at the next board meeting.

This is the second of eight episodes we recorded live and in-person at RetailClub. If this was useful, subscribe so the next one lands in your inbox.

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Comment on this newsletter in Substack or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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My First VIP Connect.

Casey’s review of the VIP Connect venue, sight unseen: “What a horrible venue.”

She was kidding, of course. It was a lawn overlooking the Pacific in Huntington Beach, which beats every hotel ballroom I’ve sat in this year. She missed the session, so she got the recap from me on camera, along with our guests for this episode of The Retail Razor Show, the two people who ran it.

VIP Connect is Vendors in Partnership’s event, held the half-day before RetailClub AI Festival kicked off. Three hours. Retailers and solution providers at the same table. Nobody pitching. The whole point is to teach each other how your organization makes decisions.

It was my first one. I walked out with a page of notes and one line I can’t stop repeating to everyone who’ll listen.

Casey and I recorded the episode live with Vicki Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Vendors in Partnership (yes, the Fairy Godmother of Retail), and Dave Finnegan, Operating Partner and Chief Connection Officer at BlackFinn Partners, who has sat in the CIO and other c-suite chairs himself.

Everybody does AI. Congratulations.

Dave opened with the day’s thesis, and it stung a little. At least it did if you’re a retail tech solution provider. Which for me, represents over two decades of delivering tech to retailers.

Every vendor in retail is saying “we do AI.” When everybody says it, a retailer can’t use it to choose anyone.

His words: the current go-to-market motion is clearly broken.

The example from the room made me laugh, then wince. A retailer took a meeting, clicked through the vendor’s website to prep, and found AI on every page. What did the company do? No clue. They left the meeting still not knowing.

The lesson for vendors?

Assume the retailer already thinks AI is in there somewhere.

Casey’s line: it’s assumed now. Lead with the problem you solve.

Dave’s version fits on a sticky note:

The budget question has a backstory.

Retailers, this section’s for you. The rep asking “do you have budget?” in meeting one has a sales manager asking the same thing about you, every week, in a pipeline review. If the rep can’t answer, the manager says move on to the next account.

I know how that sounds.

It’s still worth knowing, because the retailers in the room did something smart with it. Once they understood who was asking, they offered better questions to answer.

• “Ask me what ROI I need to show.“

• “Ask me what’s on my roadmap that I’m struggling with.”

Vicki said the way the retailers reframed it was one of the most helpful moments of the day.

Nobody has champion in their title.

Someone in the room said it and I wrote it down twice. Vendors chase titles: CIO, CMO, anyone with a C in front. Dave’s point is that champions show up as directors, VPs, CIOs, and CMOs.

The title won’t tell you which one.

So ask.

Dave said that as a CIO he’d have answered “who’s the champion?” without blinking.

Hardly anyone asks.

Vicki’s add-on might be the most useful tip of the day:

you find the champion, find the person who’ll explain how the company works. Who decides. Who gets cranky if you go around them. One conversation, and you’ve saved yourself months of beating your head against the wall.

Where I landed.

Both sides walk into these meetings thinking they know how the other operates. Mostly, they’re guessing. What fixed it at VIP Connect was boring in the best way: more questions, better questions, and people willing to explain their own org chart out loud.

My take for vendors: quit being so polite in discovery. You were trained to ask questions. Ask the ones that feel a little nosy.

My take for retailers: when a rep asks about budget, answer with the ROI you need and the roadmap problem you’re stuck on. You’ll find out fast whether they can help.

I’m holding a couple of things back.

Dave shared one question he learned from his brother, an investor, that he says changes a first meeting completely. Jump to 17:12 for that one. Then stay for his closing point on why comparing notes matters so much right now.

Watch or listen to the complete recap.

🎙️The full conversation is The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 13, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Goodpods.

It’s the first of eight episodes we recorded live at RetailClub, and they’re landing across all four Retail Razor shows over the coming weeks. If you’re not subscribed here yet, now’s a good time.

Your turn.

Next time you’re across the table from a retail tech seller, or a retail buyer… ask questions of each other. Don’t be shy.

If this landed, forward it to the people in your org that are buying or selling and hit subscribe on this newsletter and on the Retail Razor Show podcast. A five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods would be most appreciated!

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn!
Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

Subscribe now

A Container Falls Off a Ship.

About ten minutes into recording the latest episode of our ASU AI supply chain strategy series on the Data Blades podcast, Casey stopped being polite about it.

She’d been listening to Professor Brett Duarte describe how AI can handle traceability and sustainability documentation, the timestamping, the tracking, the measurement, and she said the quiet part out loud.

Her words: “We’ve got bigger problems than that, that we have been waiting our entire careers to solve.”

I said the spreadsheet part back to her because I’ve watched the same thing. Every conference agenda, every vendor pitch, every keynote, all pointed at the front of the store. Meanwhile the data that decides whether the store has anything to sell lives in a workbook that one person maintains and nobody else can open.

So this edition isn’t really a recap. It’s the argument Casey has been making, backed by a professor who teaches this for a living.

SPONSOR: ASU W.P. Carey School of Business

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WHO THIS IS FOR:

• Chief Supply Chain Officers

• Chief Operating Officers

• Chief Procurement Officers

• Chief Logistics or Distribution Officers

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• Senior executives responsible for capital strategy and risk oversight

Join peers for an executive program designed for you.

Register today at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off the registration fee.

Start with the size of the thing.

Brett opened with a number I keep repeating to people. Logistics, once you add freight, transportation, warehousing, 3PL and 4PL together, is about a $10 trillion industry. That’s a Statista figure, and it moves with global trade, so treat it as scale rather than a constant.

Here’s why it matters more than it looks.

Most AI business cases in retail get argued against a small denominator. Conversion rate. Basket size. Call deflection. Real, but small.

A percentage point against $10 trillion is a different conversation entirely, and it’s the conversation supply chain has been shut out of because it doesn’t demo well on a stage.

A container falls off a ship.

That’s Casey again, interrupting Brett’s list of disruption types with the thing that actually happens. Yes, containers can fall off ships. See this.

Brett’s answer is the best plain-English description of a control tower I’ve heard. An agent watches outside signals, weather systems, seismic data, event feeds, and matches them against your own network. Something happens.

The agent works out which of your locations sit in the path, then which orders are affected, then whether inventory can come from a different location. Then it acts on the decision instead of putting it in a queue for a person who’s already in three meetings.

He names the specific outside sources he plugs into and one commercial tool that already does a version of this. I’m not going to list them here, because he explains why each one earns its place and that reasoning is useful to hear directly. It’s around the six minute mark.

The part that will surprise your IT team.

Brett’s real point wasn’t that you should buy a control tower. It was that a person inside your operations group can now build a narrow agent for one specific problem without waiting for a project to be funded.

He calls them citizen developers, which is a term I haven’t heard used since low-code & no-code were all the rage in the pre-AI, business intelligence era. I’d call them the reason the next two years get interesting.

Once somebody in your planning team ships one agent that works, they immediately see the next ten problems shaped the same way. That’s how capability spreads in an organization, not through a roadmap.

It’s also, obviously, how things go wrong. Which is where the last third of the episode goes.

Where I landed.

I came into this series wanting to know which use cases pay off. I came out of it thinking that’s the second question.

Brett’s line, and he says it flatly:

I’ve been thinking about that phrase since we stopped recording. If governance is a capability, it has an owner, a budget and a maturity level, same as demand planning. If it’s a project, it has an end date, and then everybody moves on and forty agents keep running with nobody watching them.

And I keep coming back to Casey’s spreadsheet.

The sustainability and traceability documentation nobody wants to do is the cleanest first job to hand over. It’s measurable, it’s auditable, it’s already someone’s worst week of the quarter, and doing it well turns into a competitive position instead of a compliance cost.

If you’re looking for the first thing to automate and you want a win you can show a board, start there.

He also walks through how to choose a platform stack and how to decide between an AI-native tool and adding AI to what you already run. That comparison is worth the listen on its own, and I left it out of this issue on purpose. Give it a listen.

SPONSOR: RetailClub

RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail.

Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment.

Last chance to register is available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

Listen to the whole series.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 15: “The $10 Trillion Market: AI in logistics and the governance that decides whether it pays off.”

This is part three and the last one. Procurement, then operations, then logistics, one strategy across three conversations. They’re built to be heard together, so if you’re arriving now, start at part one.

• Part 3, Logistics: Watch/listen here.

• Part 2, Operations: Watch/listen here.

• Part 1, Procurement: Watch/listen here.

Your turn.

Brett teaches this material in ASU’s AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy program, October 5 to 7 in Tempe. Registration is at specialevents.asu.edu/878064 and the ID code RETAILRAZORASU takes $1,500 off. Seats are limited for the fall session. He mentioned another session is likely in the spring, so if October is impossible, that’s your other shot.

If this one was useful, subscribe. It’s free, it lands after every episode, and it’s the fastest way to get the argument without the 17 minutes.

Subscribe now

Comment on this newsletter in Substack or join the conversation on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Subscribe now

When safety innovation isn’t really about safety at all.

My car has lane-keeping assist. When you drift toward the line it nudges the wheel to put you back. Good intention, reasonable engineering, and it arrived bundled with the features I actually wanted.

I turned it off.

The problem is that it has never once agreed with me about where the lane is. It waits until I’m mid-decision and then pushes the wheel somewhere I didn’t ask it to go, so the feature built to keep me in my lane spends most of its time trying to steer me out of one. I don’t think it’s broken. I think nobody who shipped it has ever driven on roads like the ones where I live.

I brought this up on The Retail Razor Show this week, and our guest had a better name for it than I did.

Eric Athas is an editor at The New York Times. His book Saying No to New came out the same week our episode dropped, and he spent four years reporting it out with neuroscientists, behavioral economists, ad industry veterans, tech insiders and an astronaut.

He also interviewed me back in 2024, which is how I ended up on page 41 explaining why off-price retailers keep shipping in fresh inventory to keep shoppers treasure hunting. Casey read that page back to him on air. It lands differently inside his argument than it did when I said it.

Three things I’m still thinking about from that episode.

SPONSOR: ASU W.P. Carey School of Business

AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program

3 Days. 6 Pillars. One integrated AI operating model.

Three days with W. P. Carey #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department faculty and industry leaders on capital allocation, risk governance, and where AI actually creates supply chain value — built for the executives who own the outcome.

WHO THIS IS FOR:

• Chief Supply Chain Officers

• Chief Operating Officers

• Chief Procurement Officers

• Chief Logistics or Distribution Officers

• General Managers and transformation leaders

• Senior executives responsible for capital strategy and risk oversight

Join peers for an executive program designed for you.

Register today at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off the registration fee.

1. The gap we closed is where the customer used to think.

Eric’s central idea is what he calls the new thing gap: the time and distance between seeing something new and being able to get it.

In 1995, an ad for sneakers meant a couple of days of thinking and a half-hour drive to the mall. The gap was 30 minutes and five miles wide.

Now it’s about four seconds.

Our industry closed it on purpose, project by project, and every one of those had a defensible business case. I’ve worked on them. You probably have, too.

What Eric pointed out is that the gap was never empty. It held the deliberation.

Take it out and you don’t get a faster version of the same decision. You get a worse one that shows up later as a return.

2. An agent that agrees with you is not a feature.

I asked him who an agentic shopping agent is optimizing for. The shopper or the retailer. He said he doesn’t know, and that not knowing is the problem. Casey raised a third possibility I hadn’t considered: maybe it optimizes for itself, because an agent that never buys anything doesn’t look useful to whoever built it.

Then he connected it to motivated reasoning, the finding that people tend to arrive at conclusions they already wanted to arrive at.

He described a study where participants ranked photographs, had some of their rejected picks quietly slipped back into the accepted pile, and then rated those same rejected options highly on the second pass without noticing the swap.

We don’t reliably know what we prefer.

Put purchasing power behind a model that mirrors how you framed the question and you’ve built something that confirms an impulse at the precise moment there’s no time left to question it. Eric’s read: we’d be supercharging the magic pill effect.

3. Innovation theater has a tell.

Which brings me back to the lane-keeping assist. Eric interviewed Amber Case, who runs the Calm Tech Institute, and her framing is the cleanest I’ve heard on this. Informed without being burdened.

A backup camera clears that bar.

Put the car in reverse, look, go. No thinking required. Same with the little light that flashes when a car sits in your blind spot. Subtle, useful, and it never argues with you.

Now compare that to a smart TV you can get lost inside, or to Eric’s robot vacuum, which gets stuck, alerts his wife’s phone, and produces an actual conversation between two adults about a vacuum.

Casey made the connection I should have made years ago. Most of the people designing car dashboards don’t drive. Most of the people building retail technology have never worked a shift in a store. That’s how you end up with ads on refrigerator screens.

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The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail.

Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment.

Last chance to register is available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

Where I landed.

I went in braced to feel defensive. The book is called Saying No to New, and I’ve spent a career helping retailers build new things.

I came out somewhere else. Eric isn’t anti-retail and he isn’t anti-technology. He waited in line for iPhones. He describes himself as a former early adopter who burned out on it. His actual argument is narrower and much harder to wave off:

He has a test I’m going to keep using. The curb cut test. Does this make life better for a wide spectrum of people? Curb cuts were mandated for wheelchair users and ended up serving strollers, suitcases, skateboards and scooters. Closed captioning was built for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and is now how everybody follows whispered dialogue. That’s the bar. (If that last sentence has you scratching your head, ask any millennial friends. They’ll explain it).

My lane-keeping assist “feature” definitely does not clear the test.

Go listen to the whole thing.

🎙️The Retail Razor Show, Season 6 Episode 12: “The New Thing Gap - Saying No to New”

I left a lot out. Eric’s answer to whether the industry owes people anything on the failure side of a purchase is better than my question was, and the story he tells about an eBay seller and a broken mug is the most useful post-purchase customer experience lesson in any episode.

Casey also gets him to name the single new thing he said yes to this year, at 1:08:13, and I’m not going to spoil that one.

If you’re new here, subscribe. We publish an edition for every episode of The Retail Razor Show, plus bonus content that doesn’t make the recording.

Your turn.

Next time you feel the urge to buy a new thing, apply the curb cut test. See where you land on the test. Ask yourself if you’ve thought about why you need that new thing.

If this landed, forward it to the person on your team who keeps telling you to buy something new just because they want to replace something old. And a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods does more for us than anything else.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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Is it still pretend functionality?

Casey spent years in the ERP and supply chain tech world, and she has a name for how capacity planning felt in those systems: “pretend functionality.”

I laughed when she said it on air. Then I winced, because I’ve sat through enough demos to know exactly what she means. The screen exists. The button exists. And the planner still exports everything to a spreadsheet to get a number they trust.

Forecasting, she said, was always the dream. Run scenarios, see what’s coming, act before the shelf goes empty. Most teams never got there.

So that’s the lens I brought to the latest Data Blades conversation with Professor Brett Duarte of Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business. Brett is a clinical associate professor in ASU’s NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management and teaches in its AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program. Casey put it plainly at the top of the show: operations is where AI gets interesting and also where it gets oversold. We asked Brett to be specific.

Here’s my scorecard.

SPONSOR: ASU W.P. Carey School of Business

AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program

3 Days. 6 Pillars. One integrated AI operating model.

Three days with W. P. Carey #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department faculty and industry leaders on capital allocation, risk governance, and where AI actually creates supply chain value — built for the executives who own the outcome.

WHO THIS IS FOR:

• Chief Supply Chain Officers

• Chief Operating Officers

• Chief Procurement Officers

• Chief Logistics or Distribution Officers

• General Managers and transformation leaders

• Senior executives responsible for capital strategy and risk oversight

Join peers for an executive program designed for you.

Register today at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off the registration fee.

Real: the timing finally works.

Casey and I have heard “AI will fix forecasting” many times, so we asked what’s different now. Brett’s answer was refreshingly boring, which is why I believe it.

Four things showed up at once:

1. a huge amount of data,

2. real-time access to it,

3. computation that’s much cheaper than it used to be, and

4. models that have matured.

The part that got me was about waiting. Forecasting teams used to hold off for a window of data, sometimes six months of it, before they’d trust a new model. Brett’s point is that agentic workflows can feed information in as it arrives. As we all know, six months is an eternity in retail, especially in apparel.

A trend can come and go in that time, and you’d still be waiting on the data to prove it existed.

Real: a forecast that reads more than sales history.

Brett calls the new top layer of AI demand forecasting a reasoning layer. Statistical models and machine learning do the math underneath. A large language model sits above them and does what he called narrative synthesis and multi-source fusion.

Translation: the forecast can take a news story about consumer sentiment, a CPI release, or inflation data and fold it into the number. Planners already read that stuff. They just had nowhere to put it except a gut feel and a comment cell.

The other change is who gets to run the thing. ASU used to teach forecasting students Python syntax. Brett says they’ve stopped, because the model now asks which method you want and writes the code. I love that for managers.

I also think it means a lot more forecasts are about to get generated by people who can’t tell a good one from a bad one, which is why Brett’s program spends its time on comparing methods and judging prediction quality.

Needs proof in your own shop: the 35%.

Brett pointed to Amazon reporting a 35% reduction in stockouts from its AI inventory tools. I love a number like that. I also know your business is not Amazon (well, except for those of you reading this who work at Amazon, naturally 🙄).

Treat it as proof the direction is right. Your own pilot sets the target.

What made inventory optimization feel real to me was the workflow. An agent senses a demand spike and raises a purchase order. While it builds the order, it checks the supplier contract for budget limits and terms. Routine orders go out on their own. Important ones land in front of a human.

Brett also walked through two more company examples at 12:00, and they’re worth hearing in his words. I’m not going to spoil them here.

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RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

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The Retail Razor Podcast Network will be in booth #430 - come visit us! We’ll be recording podcasts with retailers at the event and may have a special guest with us that you don’t want to miss! Check out everything happening at RetailClub AI Festival here for last minute registration: retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.

We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

Where I landed.

I walked in hopeful and walked out with a pretty specific opinion. The AI promise in operations is real where it shortens the time between a demand signal and a purchase order.

It’s oversold anywhere it adds a new dashboard that planners export to a spreadsheet anyway. Casey already has a name for that.

If I ran a retail supply chain team tomorrow, I’d do two things before buying anything. I’d write down which orders an agent can send without asking and which ones need a person. And I’d make sure the people approving forecasts can compare them on accuracy instead of trusting whichever one came with the nicest chart.

Watch, listen, and come back next episode.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 14: “35% Fewer Stockouts: What AI Demand Forecasting Changes in Supply Chain Operations”

The full conversation is 16 minutes on Data Blades. Brett’s take on where your safety stock should sit starts at 13:10, and it’s the part I’d send to your CFO. Part 2 is live now! Subscribe so you don’t miss Part 3!

Your turn.

If this landed in your inbox from a friend, subscribe so you get Part 3.

If you want the full 3-day version, ASU runs the AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy program October 5 to 7 in Tempe. Registration is available here, and for Retail Razor listeners ID code retailrazorasu takes $1,500 off the registration cost.

Next episode is Part 3: logistics. Routing, network design, control towers, last mile, and what AI can do when a shipment goes sideways. Then we get into the governance and ROI case every executive wants before anything gets funded. Casey’s puppy Ruffles has promised to nap through that one after stealing a folder during this recording. 🐶🐾🦮

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

Subscribe now

Pilots everywhere. Impact almost nowhere?

Two numbers landed about five minutes into this latest Data Blades podcast recording, and the rest of the conversation reorganized itself around them.

Boston Consulting Group looked at AI leaders in the last year and found 2x revenue growth on specific projects, with 40 to 50% cost reduction alongside it. McKinsey, later that same year, looked at organizations that had already adopted AI and found under 1% seeing enterprise-wide impact.

The pilots work. Yet, somehow, the enterprise stays exactly where it was.

Our guest for this episode, and the next two, is Professor Brett Duarte from Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, where the supply chain program ranks #2 in the country. He teaches in the NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management, co-directs the business analytics program, and is assistant chair for graduate programs in supply chain. Casey’s response to that list of titles was an early highlight of the episode:

“It’s a good thing you’ve got lots of time on your hands.”

So yes, he is quite a busy academic. In fact, Brett is also on the faculty for ASU’s AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy executive program, that runs October 5 to 7 in the main Tempe campus. This series follows the program’s shape. Procurement today, operations next week, logistics the week after. For more details on the executive program, check out the callout block below. And if you listen to the full episode, you’ll get a discount code for $1,500 off the registration fee - just for our listeners!

SPONSOR: ASU W.P. Carey School of Business

AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program

3 Days. 6 Pillars. One integrated AI operating model.

Three days with W. P. Carey #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department faculty and industry leaders on capital allocation, risk governance, and where AI actually creates supply chain value — built for the executives who own the outcome.

WHO THIS IS FOR:

• Chief Supply Chain Officers

• Chief Operating Officers

• Chief Procurement Officers

• Chief Logistics or Distribution Officers

• General Managers and transformation leaders

• Senior executives responsible for capital strategy and risk oversight

Join peers for an executive program designed for you.

Register today at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off the registration fee.

The same two answers, every time.

Brett’s team has spent considerable time asking supply chain leaders where the gap comes from, and he says the answers come back nearly identical.

The first is infrastructure. Siloed systems, uneven data quality, fragmentation, and AI, in his phrasing, “slapped on the legacy systems.” When that’s the arrangement, nobody can see the supply chain end to end.

An AI that can only see one department produces departmental results, which is a fine description of a pilot.

The second is adoption. Whether employees pick the tools up and use them. Zero technology in that answer.

What struck me is how unglamorous both issues are. Neither one is about picking the right AI model.

What a procurement agent does while you’re in a meeting.

Brett describes agents as a digital workforce. They plan, reason, act, and learn, and they pull data across systems without being walked through it.

In procurement that splits two ways. Tactical work is supplier identification, purchase orders, supplier performance tracking. Strategic work is spend analytics, category management, contract management, supplier risk. An agent can take runs at both.

The specifics are what makes all the difference in enterprise-wide gains.

A tariff gets imposed on a particular country, and the agent shows what that does to your pricing. It reads structured and unstructured data together, so news coverage becomes an input rather than something a person happens to catch. It runs sentiment analysis on that coverage, which matters because a supplier’s trouble shows up in the press well before it shows up in your ERP.

And it automates the supplier back-and-forth that currently means opening an email client, opening the ERP, and copying between the two.

That last one sounds small. It’s most of somebody’s Tuesday.

I’d point the first agent at your contracts.

If someone gave me one agent and asked where to aim it in procurement processes, I’d aim it at the contract portfolio, and it wouldn’t be close.

Look at what a contract manager does in a week. Reads contracts. Pulls terms and conditions. Extracts performance obligations. Watches for risk. Notifies suppliers. Updates documents. Almost all of it is reading and comparing, and the cost of missing one thing is real money.

Brett’s contract agent does the reading.

• It finds contracts that have expired or come up for renewal.

• It compares the terms you signed against actual purchase orders and sales data to find where on-time delivery, lead time, or quality drifted out of the agreement.

• Then it sets up the supplier conversation with the evidence assembled: here’s what we agreed, here’s what happened, let’s talk about the renewal.

On the risk side it’s Kraljic matrix segmentation and supplier scorecards, maintained continuously instead of rebuilt every quarter by whoever drew the short straw.

In my days at Microsoft leading partner marketing for retail, I worked with multiple partners that delivered entire solutions built around these capabilities. ASU's executive program can show you how to build your own agent to do the job.

SPONSOR: RetailClub

RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail.

Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment.

Late registration is now available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

Where I landed.

I came into this recording expecting a conversation about models and left thinking about ownership.

The constraint is organizational. Companies with the budget to buy anything they want are stuck in the same place, which points at three questions:

1. who owns the AI supply chain strategy,

2. what it’s worth per function, and

3. whether the data can support an end-to-end view at all.

You can ask all three in a meeting on Monday without a vendor in the room.

The part of ASU’s program I like best because it’s the most practical is that executives build the agents themselves.

• Day one procurement,

• day two forecasting and inventory,

• day three logistics.

Then they simulate a disruption and the agents have to work it out between them.

I think he’s right, and I think that’s a more useful outcome than another slide about AI maturity.

He also talks about what makes a supply chain org a “frontier firm,” which you may have heard every LLM vendor talking about lately. His definition of it at [00:12:16] is the part of the episode I’d rewind.

Listen or watch, then come back for part 2.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 13: “Every AI Supply Chain Strategy Ran a Pilot. Under 1% Got Enterprise Impact.”

Part 1 is live now: procurement, supplier risk, and contract intelligence with Brett Duarte. Subscribe so parts 2 and 3 land in your inbox!

Your turn.

If you’re in procurement, tell me which of your contracts an agent would flag first. I’m curious whether it’s the ones you’d expect.

If you want the full 3-day version, ASU runs the AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy program October 5 to 7 in Tempe. Registration is available here, and for Retail Razor listeners ID code retailrazorasu takes $1,500 off the registration cost.

Part 2 goes downstream into operations: forecasting, inventory, and the gap between a model that predicts well and a business that acts on it. If procurement is where you decide what to buy, operations is where you find out whether you got it right.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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What Walmart learned about in-store retail media 15 years before everyone else.

Once upon a time, in what feels like a distant land, far, far away, I stood in a Walmart and squinted at the ceiling.

This was the late 2000s. TVs up in the rafters, well above eye level, too small to read, playing audio that was losing a fight with Walmart Radio. I noticed because it was my job. I was leading product teams at Hughes, delivering managed digital signage to retailers, and I would walk stores to look at the competition and how “they did it” thinking we could do better.

What I didn’t know was that Mike Hiatt had moved his family from Salt Lake City to Bentonville on the promise that he’d get to tear it all out and start over.

And so he did.

What he built was the Walmart Smart Network, and by around 2010 it was bringing in more revenue than Walmart.com. Five years later Walmart deinstalled it.

Mike is our guest on season 6 episode 11 of The Retail Razor Show. He’s now the president of Dynamic Retailing, a retail media consultancy focused on helping technology solutions providers work more effectively with retailers. He’s also assisting retailers better execute retail media strategies inside their stores, and is on the advisory boards at Venvee and Blue Zoo.

Plus, he recently wrote the book on in-store retail media. Literally. It’s called Timing the Desert. Andrew Lipsman (whom you may remember from our previous retail media podcast episode) wrote the foreword, and Casey and I spent an hour getting the version of this history that nobody bothered to write down.

SPONSOR: ASU W.P. Carey School of Business

AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program

3 Days. 6 Pillars. One integrated AI operating model.

Three days with W. P. Carey #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department faculty and industry leaders on capital allocation, risk governance, and where AI actually creates supply chain value — built for the executives who own the outcome.

WHO THIS IS FOR:

• Chief Supply Chain Officers

• Chief Operating Officers

• Chief Procurement Officers

• Chief Logistics or Distribution Officers

• General Managers and transformation leaders

• Senior executives responsible for capital strategy and risk oversight

Join peers for an executive program designed for you.

Register today at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off the registration fee.

Three things I didn’t know before we hit record.

The reach was already there. Nobody could sell it.

When the Smart Network was fully lit, with welcome screens, category channels, and product-matched endcaps, Mike’s team ran the audience numbers and pitched it internally as a Super Bowl a week. I know what you’re thinking - in his words: “But we weren’t making Super Bowl money. Nothing close at all.”

The largest addressable audience in American retail, verified human, standing in front of the product, and nobody could price it.

That gap is the whole opportunity people are chasing in 2026.

The org chart killed it.

Walmart doesn’t sell shelf space. No slotting allowances. You earn an endcap with price and product.

Then Mike’s team showed up with a new idea:

a brand could hold an endcap contractually because it was buying the media there. Five media endcaps. They sold out. Mike thinks they were underpriced.

The merchants read it as marketing taking their money, and nothing cut them in. No shared bonus, no shared number. Marketing owned the network, merchants owned the space, and neither had a reason to want the other to win.

Amazon unintentionally fixed it years later. Once Amazon published ad revenue in the billions, Walmart’s merchants started treating retail media as a number worth sharing. They get bonused on retail media dollars now. Mike says that fight is “settled” at the top tier retailers and still alive at the second.

Somebody built the measurement in 2009. Nobody wanted it.

This is the part that stung, because it’s what I could never solve at Hughes. We could schedule content to one store and one daypart. We couldn’t tell a retailer it played, that anyone saw it, or that it sold anything.

In those early days, every merchant conversation ended in impressions, dwell time, and hope.

Mike hired a team called DSIQ, Tom Opdyke and William Wu, who came out of Microsoft. They built what amounted to an ad server for physical stores before the industry had the terminology for it.

Store data in, content decisions out, sales results back.

In 2009.

It was controversial internally, because the only benchmark was online click-through rates and nobody trusted the numbers.

Imagine if everyone knew then, what we know now about in-store measurement for retail media!

SPONSOR: RetailClub

RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail.

Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment.

Late registration is now available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

Where I landed.

I’ve been both skeptical and hopeful of the in-store retail media hype cycle, mostly because I lived through the last one and watched it not work. This conversation moved me. And brings me hope that the industry, in partnership with vendors, will get it right this time.

Every structural thing that killed the Smart Network has since been fixed by someone else for some other reason.

• The online teams built the measurement and delivery stacks.

• Amazon made the revenue big enough that merchants wanted in.

• AI made per-location content cheap enough to produce, which is where Mike’s five A’s always hit a wall.

He calls the answer localization rather than personalization: treat 2,000 stores as 2,000 super customers, each with its own weather, local teams, and sales mix.

Measurement standards are still broken, and Mike’s honest about it. In-store is fragmented across content management systems, network operators, and ad servers, and he expects consolidation before the serious money arrives. He names Kroger as the likeliest to reach what Andrew Lipsman calls the cereal moment.

And one caution I appreciated him saying out loud: in-store will never be as lucrative as online, because the retailer buys the hardware. His comparison on that point is worth the listen on its own, especially if you’re managing margin.

Two things I’m leaving in the episode.

At 32:05 Mike names the exact hire that kills a retail tech deal, with an example that made me wince.

At 18:00 he tells how the book got its title, which involves a second-century parable and a use of AI I did not see coming.

Watch, listen, read.

🎙️The Retail Razor Show, Season 6 Episode 11: “The In-Store Retail Media Screens That Out-Earned Walmart.com”

Mike’s story (and book) are full of lessons learned and we managed to capture many of them in the full episode. It’s live now, available everywhere you find podcasts.

His book is Timing the Desert: A Front-Line Perspective on Retail Media, Readiness, and Scale. If you’re in retail media, you owe it to yourself to run out and get a copy of this book. History does have a tendency to repeat itself, so take advantage of Mike’s lessons learned!

If you’re new here, subscribe. We publish an edition for every episode of The Retail Razor Show, plus bonus content that doesn’t make the recording.

Your Turn.

If this landed, forward it to the person on your team who keeps asking whether you should put screens in the stores. And a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods does more for us than anything else.

Next episode: we’re joined by New York Times editor, Eric Athas. His new book, Saying No to New: Why New Things Are Stealing Your Time, Money and Happiness, and How to Take Back Your Life, delivers a different kind of lesson. We’re reflecting on all the new things retail has brought us in recent years. Are they worth it? A slight philosophical detour for us, but one that you’ll appreciate!

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn!
Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

Leave a comment

Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

From the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail, The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness retail leadership podcast explores the skills, mindset, and strategies retail executives need to lead successfully in the AI era. Stay Sharp. Lead Boldly. Stay Human.

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The accelerator mindset.

I asked Steve Worthy a question I’ve been sitting on for a long time, and I braced for a diplomatic answer.

Why do good products fail when they enter retail?

He laughed first. Then he gave me the least diplomatic answer anyone has given me on the show.

Steve is the Founder of Worthy Global Retail, and he came back to Blade to Greatness to walk Casey and me through what he calls the accelerator mindset. He spent years as a retail executive before he started coaching founders through The Forge Accelerator and The Campus, so he’s been on both sides of the meeting where a founder pitches a retailer and nothing happens afterward.

This issue, and podcast episode, is especially powerful for the founders and tech companies in the audience.

SPONSOR: ASU W.P. Carey School of Business

AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program

3 Days. 6 Pillars. One integrated AI operating model.

Three days with W. P. Carey #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department faculty and industry leaders on capital allocation, risk governance, and where AI actually creates supply chain value — built for the executives who own the outcome.

WHO THIS IS FOR:

• Chief Supply Chain Officers

• Chief Operating Officers

• Chief Procurement Officers

• Chief Logistics or Distribution Officers

• General Managers and transformation leaders

• Senior executives responsible for capital strategy and risk oversight

Join peers for an executive program designed for you.

Register today at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off the registration fee.

The 85% nobody wants to look at.

Steve pulled a number from Product School during the conversation. Somewhere between 80 and 85% of AI projects fail inside the companies that run them. And if you doubt Steve’s number, he’s not alone citing this. 5 different studies published in the last 18 months from Gartner, MIT, RAND Corporation, BCG, and McKinsey all point to the same conclusion: 70-85% of enterprise AI initiatives fail to deliver their expected value.

Then he compared this moment to the .com era, when a website was enough to start making money and most of those businesses didn’t last, because they hadn’t solved a real problem.

I’ve been calling this the AI hype machine for a while now. Steve credited me with the phrase on air, which I’ll take (even if I probably took it from somewhere else). But he pushed it somewhere I hadn’t:

Hype lets a founder skip problem definition and still feel like they’re winning, right up until the retailer stops replying.

Everybody says yes until yes costs money.

Casey named the moment every founder in this space has lived. You run 100 customer interviews. Everyone tells you they love it. Then you ask for $50,000 to go build it, and the room goes quiet.

Steve’s explanation is the part we’re usually afraid to say out loud.

Which means retail tech founders are selling a fix for a problem the buyer has decided nobody outside the building gets to see. As Steve put it:

“If I can’t tell you I truly have a problem, I don’t want your solution identifying the issue I don’t want anybody else to know about.”

Read that again as a founder and the silence after a good meeting starts to make sense.

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The test that turns a pitch into a conversation.

Here’s the tool I’d hand every founder listening.

Steve sorts retail problems into systemic and non-systemic.

• Non-systemic problems get fixed fast, usually inside one team or one store.

• Systemic problems take time, cost money, and cross departments.

Retailers fund the systemic ones.

He got this test years ago from Gregg Steinhafel, then the CEO of Target, in an interview. One store with a problem is not a problem, and it’s probably a leadership question at that store. The same problem across many stores is a conversation worth having.

Casey put the other half of it perfectly. She doesn’t mind doing a VLOOKUP. It’s an annoyance at scale. Nobody funds an annoyance.

So before the next pitch: is this one store, or is this every store? If you can’t answer with evidence, you’re asking a retailer to fund your curiosity.

Where I landed.

I said on the episode that a lot of tech startups don’t speak the language a retailer wants to hear, and I’ve believed, and witnessed, that for years. What Steve did was tell us why, and it’s less flattering than a translation problem.

Founders haven’t studied the buyer the way they’ve studied the product. They lead with the product because the product is the part they know cold.

Steve starts them somewhere else entirely, with founder fit:

why are you in retail at all, and what’s the story that connects you to it?

When a founder can’t answer, he runs the five whys with them. He joked about the grad school money he paid to learn it. He also said some founders come out of that exercise deciding to pivot, which tells you how far off the original answer usually was.

Two things I’m leaving on the podcast. Around 13:53, Casey and I get into what this AI moment is repeating from an earlier era of retail tech, and Steve’s reaction is worth hearing unedited. And around the 10-minute mark, Steve says out loud why he left the retail executive ranks. It’s the most candid 15 seconds in the episode and I’m not going to spoil it here.

Listen to the full conversation.

🎙️Blade to Greatness, Season 2 Episode 12: The Accelerator Mindset - What Retail Tech Founders Get Wrong

The complete episode is available now everywhere you find podcasts. If you get something out of these, subscribe so the next one shows up in your inbox.

Your Turn.

Subscribe now and you get the best of each episode in your inbox before you have time to listen. If this one was useful, forward it to the leader on your team who is still reading the to-do list out loud every morning instead of asking a coaching question.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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The pause you should take, but rarely ever do.

My co-host said something on the podcast recently that I’m still thinking about.

Casey went through Shannon Flanagan’s new book, got to the part about pausing, and asked herself when she last had three months where nothing was scheduled.

Her answer: the summer she was 17.

Seventeen. She went further and said she’d spent years chasing goals she set at 12 or 13, before high school, before her first job, before she knew a single thing about the world she was aiming at. It took her six months of writing to build a new list.

When a founder with that much self-awareness tells you her life plan was written by a seventh grader, the rest of us should probably go check who wrote ours.

That’s the conversation we had with Shannon on The Retail Transformers podcast recently. Shannon founded Retail Women in Tech (RWIT) and just published Choose, Don’t Chase Your Career. She wrote it in the middle of doing the thing the book describes, which is a strange and useful place to write from, but it’s something none of us knew we needed for our own careers.

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The number that stopped me.

At RWIT, Shannon runs an interview series called Power of We Wednesday. More than 80 published. Not one of those women had a linear career path.

And every one of them still walks into a hiring process where the manager says they want a generalist, then runs five to seven rounds screening for functional depth.

It’s easier to defend a hire that looks like the last one.

Fifteen years ahead of schedule.

Shannon had a plan for retirement. Run a nonprofit, write a book. Then in early 2025 both showed up 15 years early after an unexpected layoff, within weeks of each other. Her fiancé told her to go all in on RWIT. A friend called and said she wanted to write a book with her about the women of the community.

Now this is the part people skip when they tell these stories.

Shannon has three teenagers, lives in one of the most expensive areas in the country, and has never struck it rich. She said yes anyway. She now works 10 to 12 hour days plus weekends for no paycheck, and describes herself as the most stressed and the most fulfilled she’s ever been.

Money was the hardest thing she had to let go of. What moved her was one line from her financial advisor, a friend of 25 years:

See yourself as an asset, not a liability. You’ll make money again.

Shannon says she still repeats it to herself most weeks.

Three months, and the week-two trap.

Shannon explains that a real pause is about three months. That’s roughly how long it takes to come down from years of go, go, go. And almost nobody gets there, because week two is when the LinkedIn networking starts, the to-do list reappears, and the pause quietly converts into a job search with better scenery.

She told us about a friend, an EVP at a huge media company, laid off with a serious severance package, who called the next day already networking. She had a plan for yoga and walks in the park, which is what a to-do list looks like in gym clothes. When Shannon suggested she actually stop, the friend said, “I don’t know how to do that. It’s not me.”

Shannon’s answer:

Of course it’s not you. You’ve never done it. That’s how you got here.

The one thing Shannon did differently after her own first layoff was refuse to make a to-do list. That’s it. That’s the whole intervention. She sat where she was. It makes sense when you hear her say it.

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Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment.

Late registration is now available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

Where I landed.

I went into this recording thinking the pause was a luxury good. Something you can afford at a certain level of severance and not before.

I came out thinking most people in corporate roles have more room than they act like they have, and that the reason we don’t take it has very little to do with the mortgage. Taking three months means telling people you’re taking three months, and there’s no comfortable way to say that at a dinner party. The to-do list is easier. It’s proof you’re still a serious person.

Shannon’s counter-question gets under your skin.

And the reframe I’m stealing:

Nobody answers that one with the BMW.

Two things I’m leaving in the episode.

Shannon reads the quote she closes the book with at 48:39. I’m not writing it here, because the point is hearing her read it, and Casey nearly cries over it. It’s truly, a very real, honest moment. Go listen to that bit. You’ll thank me later, and you’ll really appreciate why Shannon’s story is one you didn’t know you needed to hear.

Earlier, at 41:12, the story of why she isn’t narrating her own audiobook turns into the most surprising number in the hour. Worth your time as one of the most fun moments in the episode.

Go even deeper.

Season 2, Episode 9 of Retail Transformers: “Choose – don’t chase – your career, with Shannon Flanagan”

Watch or listen to the full conversation. It’s available now in your favorite podcast player and on our YouTube channel.

Shannon’s book, Choose, - Don’t Chase - Your Career, is on Amazon. Retail Women in Tech is free to join with no paywall at retailwomenintech.org.

Your turn.

If this one hit, forward it to the person you know who’s in the middle of a rewrite right now. And if you’re not subscribed yet, that’s the button.

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

From the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail, The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness retail leadership podcast explores the skills, mindset, and strategies retail executives need to lead successfully in the AI era. Stay Sharp. Lead Boldly. Stay Human.

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The question I keep avoiding.

I told April Sabral on air that this might be my favorite topic, which is a risky thing to say before your guest starts talking. She then spent 15 minutes making me feel like I should audit my own last three meetings.

April wants leaders to end your meeting by asking the team:

what did you learn from me today?

The question that would tell you the most about your leadership is the one you avoid, and you avoid it for exactly the reason you should be asking it. I remember many times in a past role where I was part of a team that wished our executive leader asked this question at the end of a meeting. He probably wouldn’t have liked the answer.

April was back on the Blade to Greatness podcast this week. If you’re not familiar with her work, she’s a bestselling author (most recently published Positive Accountability for Teams: Building a Culture of Success) and a leadership coach. Our topic was the manager to coach reset that retail really needs right now. Casey Golden framed the timing: this has been a hard sales year, holiday is coming soon, and teams are being judged on numbers the economy is setting for them.

That’s the exact moment leaders default to pushing the to-do list. April’s argument is that the to-do list is what makes everything worse.

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Register by August 28 at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

The 80/20 test.

This is April’s simple test, and it costs nothing.

When you leave your next meeting, count you time speaking vs listening. If you didn’t spend 80% of it listening and 20% of it talking, you haven’t made the shift to coaching yet.

I like this test because it forces you to be honest. Most leadership advice is hard to fake. This one gives you an immediate answer, and the answer is usually no.

April’s setup for it is the part I keep repeating in conversations with retail leaders. In a store, we push people to ask customers questions. Listen to what they say. Respond to that. Most retail people do this well. Then we promote them, hand them a team, and the skill vanishes. They start believing the job is telling people what to do all day.

Same person, same building, new title. The questions stop.

April’s fix is simple and intentionally not very glamorous:

Write your questions down before the meeting. Before the huddle, the store visit, the call. Two questions she uses to open are what did you learn yesterday, and what will you try differently today.

Five words instead of “you missed target.”

This is the part I would tape onto the inside of a back office door. In a giant font size.

When someone misses a number, don’t open with the number. If your expectations were clear, they knew before you walked in. You know they know. They know that you know they know. Saying it out loud only tells them you came to lecture. No one wants to be lectured.

Open with this instead: walk me through your process.

Then stop talking and listen for where it broke down.

April calls what comes next coaching the gap, and the point is that you now know where the gap actually is.

You can’t coach a number. You can coach the one step in a sequence where somebody hesitated or strayed.

April walks through exactly how that conversation goes at 11:53 in the episode, including the part where the person starts diagnosing it for you. Worth two minutes.

Her honest caveat: this takes real skill and effort from the leader, and it’s slower. That cost is why most people skip it, even though it’s practically gold.

Positivity you can put on a scorecard.

Casey asked the question I wanted to ask, which is how you measure any of this when sales are down for reasons nobody on your team controls.

April’s answer was simple and accountable:

• Track turnover.

• Track customer reviews.

• Track productivity.

Measure them before and after coaching training, and positive leadership stops being a thing you have to defend in a budget meeting.

Then she said the line that made the episode for me, and I am 100% stealing it:

April can read it walking into a store. The person in front of her is tense, head down, finishing a task. Nobody has recognized them lately. Nobody has taught them anything lately. The customers standing in that store feel it too. Which is how it lands in your reviews and then in your sales numbers.

Where I landed.

Retail leadership coaching typically gets filed under soft skills, and that filing is why it keeps losing to the to-do list when the sales quarter gets tight.

April’s framing fixes that. Operational consistency comes from systems, growth comes from questions. Keep every system you have. She’s clear those come first.

If you only run systems, you get a team that executes, stops improving, and leaves for somewhere that develops them. Every exit interview says the same thing. People want to be trained.

Watch, listen, subscribe.

🎙️Blade to Greatness, Season 2 Episode 11: Retail Leadership Coaching & The 80/20 Rule That Defines It

The full episode with April Sabral is available now. It runs 15 minutes. That’s less time than one exit interview, and considerably cheaper in the long run.

Next episode preview: Steve Worthy returns to address something every retail tech founder needs to hear. He calls it “the accelerator mindset,” and it’s all about how growth really happens in retail businesses.

Your Turn.

Subscribe now and you get the best of each episode in your inbox before you have time to listen. If this one was useful, forward it to the leader on your team who is still reading the to-do list out loud every morning instead of asking a coaching question.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, innovation & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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I’ve been promised robots my whole life.

Casey joked on this episode that she expected to be living like the Jetsons by now. Instead, she’s doing her own dishes and hauling her own Amazon returns. I’m in the same boat. Decades of demos, and robotics has mostly lived somewhere between science fiction and a slide deck.

So I came into this conversation open-eyed and enthusiastic, while also a bit skeptical. What gave it an edge and drew me in was one of Brittain Ladd’s LinkedIn posts about grocery retail.

If you spend much of your time doom-scrolling your LinkedIn feed you’ve seen Brittain tell grocery leaders to go meet Hank Crawford and his team. Repeatedly. Across multiple posts. Brittain doesn’t hand those out for fun. He only doles out recommendations like this after a thorough analysis which he fully documents in his posts. I wanted to know what he was seeing that the rest of us were missing.

So we invited Hank onto the show, and he brought Paul Harker with him. Hank is Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Collar Robotics. Paul retired as Chief Commercial Officer of Woolworths Group, Australia’s largest retailer, and signed on with Blue Collar as a strategic advisor. That second part matters. A man with nothing left to prove doesn’t lend his name to a robotics startup casually.

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Register by August 28 at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.

The number that reset the conversation.

There are about 280,000 people picking groceries inside US stores right now.

In the aisle, with a cart, walking past you while you shop, assembling somebody else’s order. The demand for that work is growing faster than grocers can hire for it, especially at 2 and 3 in the morning, which is exactly when you’d want it done.

I’ve watched the friction firsthand at my own store. Shoppers looking irritated because they feel like they’re in the way. Pickers looking irritated because they are, in fact, in the way.

Casey put it best:

If you’ve been to New York City at the end of a work day, you know exactly why Casey’s comparison resonates. And if you haven’t… it’s ok, no judgment.

Paul’s number is the one that should worry any grocery retail operator.

Over 80% of a grocer’s business is still the customer physically in the store.

So eGrocery growth, the thing everyone is chasing, is quietly degrading the business that pays the bills, and delivers the largest share of customer experience.

The warehouse answer already lost.

The industry’s first attempt to solve the eGrocery fulfillment problem was possibly the most obvious one. Copy general e-commerce and build a big automated centralized fulfillment center Then pick everything there.

Hank listed four reasons it collapsed, and none of them are fixable with a better robot.

The economics are volume dependent, so you need order density to justify the building. The building pulls inventory away from the customer, which pushes last-mile cost back up. Fresh resists automation. And the capital expense is enormous. A spend that duplicates the store network the grocer already paid for.

Micro fulfillment centers were the compromise, and Paul took them apart just as cleanly. Casey and I were surprised. We remember our MFC episode from season 2. At the time, it showed a lot of promise.

The challenge is you still need space adjacent to the store or you carve into your own selling floor. You still carry heavy CapEx. You duplicate inventory. And people still pick the fresh items and what he calls the uglies, because nobody has automated someone ordering a mop.

So the industry came back to the store. With people. All 280,000 of them.

They sell picks by the item.

Here’s the part I keep chewing on. Blue Collar’s product is the pick itself. Not the robot rolling through the aisles doing the picking.

A grocer pays a cost per pick, which means the spend lands in OpEx instead of a capital project, and the grocer never hires a robotics engineer. Blue Collar signs up to a contracted pick rate and a quality standard.

Hank’s line was blunt: if they miss it, the retailer doesn’t pay the bill.

The robot handles packaged center-aisle goods with vacuum suction, which is roughly 65% of a typical basket. Frozen food behind glass doors is out of scope. Fresh stays with the associates, which is where you’d want your best people anyway. picking ripe avocados.

Blue Collar reports fulfillment cost down by as much as 50%.

And there’s a person behind every robot.

A remote operator watches, takes the hard calls, and the robot learns from what that person does. Hank designed it that way on purpose, partly so the robot develops what he calls robot etiquette: it hangs back and lets the shopper shop.

He’s got a story about a hotel in China that explains exactly what he’s trying to avoid. It’s at 40:18 and it’s worth the two minutes.

Where I landed.

I went in expecting a labor-replacement pitch and got the opposite argument.

Hank’s position is that nobody is standing in line for picking jobs. Grocers can’t fill the roles they already have.

eGrocery is somewhere around 15% of the business and could double inside two to five years.

The constraint is scarcity.

Then Paul made the point that’s stuck with me ever since. Today you can only take that job if you can physically get to one specific store during specific hours. Remote operation deletes both constraints. Someone who uses a wheelchair can’t walk a store picking orders. They can run a robot that does.

The thing I can’t shake is Hank’s read on his own pipeline. The national retailers are finding him. They understand the problem. What’s missing is urgency.

Listen to the whole thing.

🎙️The Retail Razor Show, Season 6 Episode 10: “280,000 Pickers: The eGrocery Fulfillment Math Nobody Fixed”

Hank and Paul are both worth the full hour, and Paul has a genuinely strong philosophical detour near the end about whether societies will bend the real world to suit robots or build robots that suit the real world. I didn’t see that one coming.

If you’re new here, subscribe. We publish an edition for every episode of The Retail Razor Show, plus bonus content that doesn’t make the recording.

Your Turn.

If you learned something from this issue, subscribe so the next edition finds you.

Next episode: we’re jumping head first into the world, and history, of in-store retail media. The former head of Walmart TV’s successor, Walmart Smart Network tells us where it’s headed.

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Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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Should your refrigerator have a personality?

Casey asked that about ninety seconds into our latest Retail Transformers episode. She was listing everything marketing has had to absorb in the past ten years. Billboards to banner ads to AI agents to creator economies to retail media networks to, and I’m quoting her, whether your refrigerator should have a personality.

I laughed and said that’s what everybody needs. Then I remembered who was waiting to be introduced. Cole Moir spent the last three years leading brand marketing at TCL, which makes, among other things, refrigerators. So the joke may not age well.

That’s the problem with marketing right now. The absurd thing you say to get a laugh is somebody’s roadmap.

Cole is at a transition point in his career, which is the only reason a conversation like this happens. Twenty years at Ogilvy, 360i, and Edelman, then Samsung, Sony Entertainment, Motorola, and TCL, where the brand became the fastest-growing consumer electronics company two years running. He’s owned the NFL relationship. He’s partnered with Olympic athletes. And nobody’s PR team was on the call.

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31% of the Fortune 500 has no CMO.

That’s the number he opened with, and he named Starbucks, Walgreens, and General Motors.

I’d watched the trend for years. The number was new to me. Once you have it, the story tells itself:

the job got more accountable, less protected, and stretched across channels that didn’t exist three budget cycles ago.

So companies rename it. Chief growth officer. Chief revenue officer. Or they don’t backfill at all.

Cole’s read is that the job became a business job, and the word he reached for was transformation. Casey pushed on the obvious next question. Does the next CEO come out of marketing rather than sales? Cole said he’d put money on it. So would I.

Taste is now a hireable skill.

This is the part I didn’t expect.

Cole listed the three things he’d tell a 25-year-old marketer to build. Data was first, which anyone could have guessed. Talking to real customers was third, which is the kind of thing leaders say and rarely fund.

Second was taste.

His reasoning is that AI can produce infinite creative, so the constraint moves to the person who can look at a hundred versions and know which one is right for this brand, this audience, this week.

He wants that judgment on the payroll. I’ve never heard a marketing leader put taste in a skills stack next to data literacy, and it took about four seconds to make sense. Because of course it does.

The partnership math nobody publishes.

Here’s how a challenger TV brand like TCL builds the case for an NFL deal.

Only 5% of NFL fans have ever been to a game. 95% watch at home, on their own TV or a friend’s. And of the 100 most-watched TV shows over the past decade, 96 are football.

That’s a category argument.

Cole ran three tests on every partnership:

1. does this partner give us credibility we haven’t earned

2. audiences we can’t otherwise reach

3. content we can’t produce at scale

At TCL he needed all three, which he says is rare.

The Olympics story is better. TCL partnered with Jack and Quinn Hughes four or five months ahead of the Games, to build the relationship before anything ran. Then Jack scored the gold medal goal. Cole quoted his old coach: success is when preparation meets opportunity.

Where I landed.

There are two things I’m still chewing on.

The first is the budget. Casey handed him $200 million on air and he split it in about forty seconds, with real percentages and a floor underneath. I’m leaving the split out of this newsletter issue, partly because he earned the right to say it himself and partly because his reasoning matters more than the numbers. It starts at 32:39. What I will give you is the floor: 25% in the upper and mid funnel, and if you’re under it, he thinks you’ll feel it inside two years. Tech buying cycles in his world ran six months to seven years. You can’t convert people who never entered consideration.

The second is his test. I’ve already asked three people this week.

If they’d go back, it’s attached to a plan that runs fine without it. If it breaks, something real happened.

Everyone I’ve asked so far would go back. Including two people who talk about AI constantly. It’s the perfect test for every leader to seriously think about.

He also named the four roles he says every marketing team needs, and the two he’d stop hiring for. That one starts at 13:32, and it’s worth checking out.

Go deeper.

Season 2, Episode 8 of Retail Transformers, with Cole Moir: “31% of the Fortune 500 Has No CMO Role.”

Watch or listen to the full episode and learn what Cole sees the CMO role evolving to in the near future. Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

Your Turn.

If you’re new here, subscribe. Casey Golden and I do this every week, and the guests keep saying things they probably shouldn’t. And that makes it extra special fun.

Next time on the show: Shannon Flanagan returns to talk about her new book, what RWIT has achieved a year later, and what her career path has taught her.

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

Leave a comment

Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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Everyone said the robots would take restaurant jobs.

I went into our Data Blades 3-part finale half-believing it too.

Then Dr. Chad Moutray, the chief economist at the National Restaurant Association, put a number in front of me that I keep repeating to people.

94% of operators told the NRA their technology investments over the past two to three years did not permanently eliminate a single job.

Not trimmed. Not “mostly.” Zero permanent cuts, for 94 out of 100 operators.

I sat with that on the recording, because the story we all carry around is so different. A machine shows up, a person goes home. The data says something quieter happened. The technology made the people already there faster.

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RetailClub AI Festival, September 22 - 24, 2026

The Retail Razor Podcast Network is partnering with RetailClub!

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The margin is why this matters.

Chad grounded the whole thing in one brutal number. A typical full-service restaurant runs on a 2.8% profit margin. Limited service is around 4%, and it keeps shrinking.

When your margin is that thin, you don’t buy restaurant technology to look modern. You buy an hour back. So the question stops being “will this replace someone” and becomes “where is my team losing time that doesn’t pay off.”

Hiring is where the clock is loudest.

The average restaurant turns over 122% of its staff a year. The average applicant applies to at least 15 jobs. So speed decides who actually gets the worker.

Chad described operators who went from weeks to a few days between posting a role and filling it.

When you pull days out of that cycle, you pull days out of the understaffing that wrecks a shift.

There’s a specific piece of this I loved, and I’m going to make you watch for it. People apply for restaurant jobs at strange hours, often after the kids are down, at one or two in the morning.

No manager is awake for that.

But something else can be. How that “something else” gets a qualified applicant onto a manager’s calendar without a human touching it is the cleverest restaurant staffing move in the episode. It’s at 08:18. Go see it. Or listen. Your choice.

The part nobody should skip.

Here’s the takeaway theme of the episode:

Chad was blunt about the tradeoff:

new technology usually adds work before it saves work, and you may be reskilling current staff to run it.

That up-front cost is real, especially with fast turnover. And then Casey made the point that reframed the episode for me. In retail, most people opening a support chat are already annoyed. In a restaurant, almost everyone who walks in came to have a good time. You can automate the hiring, the paperwork, the reminders.

You can’t automate the welcome.

Lose that and you lost the reason they came.

Where I landed.

The recurring theme that survived all three episodes?

Technology augments what people do. It doesn’t replace why they’re there.

Watch or listen, and subscribe.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 12: “94% of Restaurants Cut Zero Jobs to Technology”

Watch or listen to the full finale, and if you subscribe you’ll get the next series the moment it drops.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this newsletter, subscribe so the next amazing mini-series lands in your inbox. It’s free, it’s every episode, and it comes with exactly this much attitude. You’ll thank me later.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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The hidden economics of employee retention.

I’ve recorded a lot of conversations about labor, especially frontline workers. It’s one of our most important themes we carry across every podcast. Most of them leave me with a good vibe. This one left me with a number, and I haven’t been able to shake it.

Day 32.

That’s roughly when a new hourly restaurant worker stops costing you money and starts making you some.

For a manager, it’s day 72.

I heard Dr. Chad Moutray say it on the record and my first thought was: does anyone run their schedule like they know this?

Chad is the Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge at the National Restaurant Association, and he came on for Part 2 of our Hiring & Staffing series to talk about the least glamorous, most expensive problem in the business: keeping the people you already hired.

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Every hire starts underwater.

Here’s the framing that reorganized my thinking.

The day you hire someone, they’re a loss. You paid to post the job, paid in manager hours to interview, paid for orientation, paid for the training and the mentoring from the people showing them the ropes.

On day one they add nothing to the bottom line.

“Net positive” is the day the math flips. Chad used to call it the magic number. For hourly staff it lands at 31.8 days. And if you lose someone at day 20, the report’s blunt about it: that was a bad hire. You paid to train someone who never paid you back.

The manager math is the scary one.

72.2 days.

More than double.

So restaurant manager retention is a different order of risk. Lose a manager at day 40 and you’re not just down a person, you burned two months of investment and you’re restarting the whole 72-day clock.

Then Chad said the part that actually worried me.

A manager doesn’t leave alone.

The good ones have a following.

People take the job because of them and follow them across stores. So a bad manager quietly drains your hourly staff, and a great one who walks out the door can take a chunk of the team with them. That’s the domino I hadn’t priced in.

If you’ve worked in restaurants or stores, you know how powerful it is to have a great manager. Now think back to that great manager you had, and imagine they left. Would you want to follow them where ever they landed?

The first 90 days is where it’s won or lost.

The report flags 30 to 90 days as the highest-turnover window, and Chad’s reasons were refreshingly ordinary. People stay when they feel heard early. When the job matches what they were sold in the interview. When someone cross-trains them so they feel useful and needed instead of parked on one station.

You’ve heard it forever: people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.

What got me is that Chad has watched this exact pattern outside restaurants too, in a completely different industry, and it held. I’ll let him tell that one on the episode, because the where and the why surprised me and you’ll want to hear it from him.

Where I landed.

If the manager is the single biggest lever on whether someone reaches day 32, then “invest in retention” stops being a poster in the break room and becomes a budgeting decision.

I asked Chad where the first tight dollar should go. His answer was onboarding, the first two weeks, getting people productive and connected fast.

And my favorite moment of the whole conversation was one operator’s onboarding trick that turns day one into a game. I’m not going to spoil how it works here. It’s worth hearing Chad describe it, and it reframed onboarding for me from paperwork into something people actually remember. Hint: it involves creative gamification.

Watch or listen, and subscribe.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 11: “The 32-Day Pay Off: Restaurant Employee Retention”

The full episode has the 31.8 and 72.2-day math, the manager domino effect, and that onboarding idea in Chad’s own words.

Next week we close the series on how technology is reshaping restaurant hiring and training, without replacing the human touch that makes hospitality work. Subscribe so it lands in your inbox.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this newsletter, subscribe so Part 3 lands in your inbox. It’s free, it’s every episode, and it comes with exactly this much attitude. You’ll thank me.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

Join the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail as we cut through the clutter in retail strategy, technology & leadership to help you maximize growth for your business. Subscribe to The Retail Razor Show podcast! Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

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Store Traffic Is A Gift.

We chased Mark Ryski for months. On air I honestly couldn’t remember how many, and Mark’s answer was “decades in the making,” which tells you how these scheduling threads go. Worth every follow-up email.

Here’s why.

Ten minutes into the conversation, Casey described how store staffing decisions got made when she worked the floor:

And Mark, the man who’s spent almost 30 years measuring store traffic, just repeated it back: “It was a vibe.”

That exchange is the whole episode in miniature. The most important number in physical retail, in-store conversion, still gets run on vibes at most chains.

Mark Ryski is the founder and CEO of HeadCount Corporation and has written three books on retail traffic and in-store conversion. His newest, Store Traffic Is a Gift, is the reason we finally got him on The Retail Razor Show.

Mark’s origin story alone earns the listen.

Marketing manager at a computer store in the early 90s, watching a packed promo day end with the owner counting the till and shrugging “it was okay.” The commercial traffic counter cost $2,500; the owner said no, that’s another radio remote. So Mark had two engineering students who worked part-time in the store build him one. $300 in RadioShack parts, an infrared beam, data dumped to Excel.

He’s been counting shoppers ever since.

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The store is the best converting channel in retail. By a lot.

A typical online site converts under 3% of its visitors. Amazon, around 10% excluding Prime members.

Physical stores convert 20%, 30%, up to 70%+ depending on category.

And per the US Census Bureau’s March 2026 report, 84% of retail sales still happen inside stores.

Casey’s test: if a store converted 2% and let 98 of every 100 visitors leave without a hello, you’d close it and fire everyone.

That exact math gets celebrated on e-commerce dashboards every single day.

77% of the walkouts came to buy.

Mark worked with a 60,000 sq ft big box retailer convinced that everyone who visited bought something. So HeadCount ran exit surveys on shoppers leaving without a bag. Two questions.

• Did you intend to buy today? 77% said yes.

• Why didn’t you? Couldn’t find anyone to help. Didn’t want to wait in line. Couldn’t get questions answered.

The traffic was already there, already paid for.The sales walked out the door.

And a retailer counting only transactions never sees it happen, because the till can’t count the people who left.

Mark’s favorite line on this came from a store manager, and it became the book’s title. Store traffic is a gift.

It’s also, as he puts it, precious and non-renewable: that shopper got off the couch, got in the car, and drove to you, and if the visit goes badly there are a hundred other ways to buy the same product.

When retailers tell him they run a “destination store,” his answer is that unless the store is on Mars, he doesn’t believe it.

Your labor schedule is probably circular.

Labor follows sales: stores that sell more get more staff.

Sounds reasonable, and it’s backwards.

Sales happen where staff are present to convert, so staffing to sales just reinforces the pattern you already have.

Mark’s fleet data shows conversion ranging from 30% to 75% within a single chain, same products, same training. The stores at 75% aren’t the flagships. He has a method for finding them (quadrant analysis, around 28:08) that I won’t try to compress here, because his walkthrough is better than my summary.

Where I landed.

I’ve spent years pushing back on retail apocalypse headlines, and this episode gave me the sharpest ammunition yet.

The store isn’t retail’s legacy problem. It’s retail’s highest-converting asset, run with less measurement discipline than the average email campaign. If you own stores and you can’t say what your conversion rate was yesterday, that’s the gap.

Not traffic. Not Amazon. Measurement.

Mark also gives his 5 fastest conversion wins early in the conversation (20:55). I’m deliberately not listing them. The first one alone is worth the listen, and his delivery of “for God’s sake” is worth the other four.

Go deeper.

🎙️The Retail Razor Show, Season 6 Episode 9: “Store Traffic Is a Gift - Retail's Most Misunderstood Metric”

🎧 Watch or listen to the full conversation with Mark Ryski.

📖 Mark’s book, Store Traffic Is a Gift, and HeadCount Corporation.

Your Turn.

If this landed, subscribe so the next edition finds you.

Next episode: we’re going deep into the real-world advantages of robotics in grocery retail.

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Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show

The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast cuts through the noise, turning complex retail research into actionable insights for AI-first strategies that optimize customer experiences and business operations.Stay Sharp. Be Data-Driven. Harness AI!

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My Son Took a Restaurant Job. An Economist Says It’s the Best Training in America.

My son came home from college in May and took a job in a restaurant kitchen. I figured he’d learn to show up on time and maybe stop treating our dishwasher at home like a suggestion.

Then Casey and I sat down with Dr. Chad Moutray, Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge at the National Restaurant Association, to record the newest episode of Data Blades, and Chad informed me my son basically enrolled in the biggest training program in America.

Half of all Americans got their first job in a restaurant.

Two-thirds of us have worked in one at some point. Chad included. Me? Never did. After this conversation I feel like I skipped a semester everyone else took.

We recorded this one last month just days after a fresh JOLTS release and the monthly jobs report, so this was a live read on the labor market, not a history lecture. Restaurants added 48,000 jobs in May and 220,000 over the past year. Chad’s take: the labor market is more resilient than anyone gives it credit for, mostly because people will cancel a vacation before they cancel dinner out. Respect.

Three things from this conversation are still rattling around in my head.

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One empty chair costs more than you think.

Here’s the number that made me put my coffee down.

One person. A single gap can cut sales 7 to 8% per meal period.

The mechanics are painfully simple. Short a server, and tables sit empty because the servers you do have can only cover so much floor. Short a cook, and the kitchen slows down until somebody’s shutting off third-party delivery just to survive the rush. Every one of those turned-away orders is money you already spent rent, insurance, and food costs to be ready for.

I used to file understaffing under “annoying.” It’s a line item. Run the math on your own empty shifts and watch how fast your next scheduling meeting changes.

The Great Stay is a window, not a fix.

Understaffing dropped from 78% of operators in 2021 to 22% in 2025. Hiring is genuinely easier. The Great Resignation gave way to the Great Stay, where people anxious about the economy hold onto the job they’ve got.

So naturally I asked Chad for the takeaway, expecting something comforting. Instead he calmly explained that fertility rates are at an all-time low, boomers keep retiring, and the US is heading toward net negative population growth.

His exact words: demographics are not our friend.

He expects tight labor markets for a decade or more. The man delivers hurricane forecasts in a weather-report voice, and I mean that as a compliment.

My read: this cooler market is a window for hiring deliberately instead of desperately. Windows close.

You run a hiring machine whether you like it or not.

Average restaurant turnover in 2025: 122%.

The industry runs roughly 952,000 hires and 937,000 separations every single month.

The average restaurant rebuilds its entire team every year. Casey called operators “masters of onboarding” and she wasn’t joking.

She also said that if she had to hire six great people fast, she’d skip the resume pile entirely and go poach servers, because nobody on earth hustles like someone who’s survived a Friday dinner rush with ten tables. I laughed. Then I realized she’s completely right, and I’ve been reading resumes for the wrong reasons.

Chad walked us through how operators are compressing hiring from weeks to days, including chatbots that screen the candidate who applies at 3 a.m., and how chains use data to spot which location is about to crack before it ever shows up on a P&L.

I won’t spoil the details here.

That part starts around the 18-minute mark and it’s worth hearing in his words.

Where I landed.

The tech buys you speed. The people are the product. Nobody has ever walked back into a restaurant because the applicant tracking system was excellent.

They come back for the bartender who remembers their order and the server who shows up at the table at exactly the right moment.

Restaurant staffing is a math problem and a people problem at the same time, and the operators who win the next decade will be the ones who take both seriously.

Also, I may owe every restaurant kitchen in America an apology for underestimating them. My son’s learning more this summer than I expected.

Hear the whole conversation.

🎙️The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 10: “Restaurant Labor Market 2026 - The $5,000 Cost of Understaffing”

This is Part 1 of a three-episode series with Dr. Chad Moutray on the NRA’s 2026 Hiring & Staffing report. Watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Part 2 gets into the number that genuinely surprised me: how long a new hire takes to become profitable, and why the first 90 days decide everything.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this, subscribe so Part 2 lands in your inbox. It’s free, it’s every episode, and it comes with exactly this much attitude. You’ll thank me.

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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades

From the #1 Indie Podcast Network for Retail, The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness retail leadership podcast explores the skills, mindset, and strategies retail executives need to lead successfully in the AI era. Stay Sharp. Lead Boldly. Stay Human.

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Scaling Innovation in Retail Without Innovation Theater.

Casey and I got Andy Laudato back on the show, again. Sixth time now, I think. I’ve lost count as he’s become a fan favorite across the podcast network. Every single time he says something that makes me want to hit pause and just sit there for a second.

This time it was a stat we keep hearing from one guest after another. He tossed it out casually, like it was nothing.

Ninety to ninety-five percent of AI projects fail.

Ninety to ninety-five percent. Andy’s the COO of The Vitamin Shoppe, so this isn’t some guy on a stage in Vegas selling you a framework. This is someone who has to look a board in the eye and explain where the budget went. Yes, he’s not the first guest to quote this stat. He may be the fifth. It’s a genuine trend. That tells you just how much everyone is paying attention to it.

So naturally, we spent the next twenty minutes talking about why retail leaders keep doing this to themselves anyway, and what it takes to scale innovation without setting money on fire.

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The Demo Room Problem.

You know the room.

Everybody’s gathered around a screen or a kiosk in the flagship store, the tech works exactly like it’s supposed to, and somebody in a nice blazer says “great, let’s put this in every store.”

Andy’s reaction to that sentence is basically: congratulations, you just set yourself on fire. That’s innovation theater in real time, and most retail leaders don’t recognize it until the bill shows up.

Here’s the part nobody says out loud in that room.

A pilot that costs $20,000 in one store does not cost $20,000 across a thousand stores. It costs $20 million.

Everybody can find twenty grand lying around. But as Andy reminds us, nobody, and I mean nobody, has an extra twenty million sitting in a drawer waiting to get spent on a “great idea.”

Andy’s answer to this isn’t complicated, and that’s what I liked about it.

Before you fall in love with a pilot, do the math on what it costs to actually scale it.

Not what it costs to look good in a demo. What it costs to be live, everywhere, for real.

Off Broadway, Not Opening Night.

Here’s the part that actually changed how I think about testing new ideas.

Andy doesn’t test big swings in the flagship store. He tests them somewhere nobody’s watching. He calls it testing “off Broadway,” which, I’ll admit it’s a good line and I’m stealing it.

The logic is simple once you hear it:

you want the smallest blast radius possible while you’re still figuring out if something works.

Your flagship is not the place to figure that out. Your flagship is the place you go once you already know it works.

I’m not going to give away exactly which stores Andy uses for this or how his teams end up volunteering for it, that part of the conversation is worth hearing him tell it himself, but the short version is this:

the stores you’d assume are the least exciting are usually the most eager to try something new. Nobody’s watching them as closely, so there’s less pressure and, weirdly, more fun.

Fail Like You Mean It.

This is the line from Andy that’s going to stick with you for a while:

rewarding failure is easy to say and really hard to do.

Everybody says they want a culture where people can take risks. Almost nobody actually builds one. The second a project doesn’t work, the instinct is to bury it, rename it, and never speak of it again. Andy calls that “the project that will not be named,” and if you’ve worked in retail for more than a week, you already know exactly which project he means at your own company.

His fix isn’t complicated either, though actually doing it takes real discipline.

Sit down. Talk through what went wrong, out loud, as a team. That’s the whole trick.

Where I Landed.

🎙️Blade to Greatness, Season 2 Episode 10: Scaling Innovation - A Retail COO’s Playbook

Here’s where I actually landed after this conversation, and it’s not the opinion I expected to have going in.

I used to think the hard part of innovation was coming up with the good idea. Every retailer I talk to has a drawer full of good ideas. The hard part, the actual skill of scaling innovation, is everything Andy talked about:

• doing the math before you fall in love,

• testing somewhere nobody’s watching, and

• being willing to talk honestly about the stuff that didn’t work.

None of that is glamorous.

Nobody’s writing a newsletter about their boring cost model. Except me, apparently, right now. But it’s the difference between a retailer who actually scales innovation and one who just performs it for a room full of executives once a year.

We didn’t even get to the part where Andy showed us what his team built for the new Manhattan flagship, or the reason he refuses to split his company into “innovation people” and “everyone else.”

That’s in the full episode, and it’s worth your time.

Give it a listen (or watch), and if you’re not already subscribed here, go ahead and fix that too. This is exactly the kind of conversation Blade to Greatness exists for: the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a retail leader succeeds.

Your Turn.

If someone forwarded you this and you want more of it in your inbox, the kind of retail writing that is occasionally useful and almost never about synergy or leverage, the subscribe button is right down there. It’s free.

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Until next time… Stay sharp. Lead boldly. Stay human.

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Blade to Greatness

Retail Transformers brings you candid conversations with the people reshaping the future of commerce - the crazy ones, the rebels, the change makers, innovators, disruptors, and bold thinkers. Stay Sharp. Be Bold. Transform Retail!

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The Leadership Capacity Gap.

Every so often Casey and I record an episode that makes me want to put my own notes down and just listen like everyone else. This was one of those.

Our guest was Louisa Loran. Former exec at Google, Maersk, Moet Hennessy, and Diageo. Advisor to CEOs. Author of a recent book called Leadership Anatomy in Motion. On paper, I figured we’d spend an hour on AI in retail and call it a day. Instead she spent the hour dragging the conversation away from the tech and pointing it straight at the people in charge. I did not see that coming, and I’m still chewing on it.

Here’s some of what stuck. Not all of it. You’ll want the rest for yourself.

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The thing nobody wants to say out loud.

Louisa’s whole argument starts from an uncomfortable place.

Not the economy. Not the tariffs. Not even the customers. The tools are sitting right there. The budgets exist. The market keeps moving. And still, transformation stalls, because the people at the top haven’t done the work on themselves.

I’ve covered retail tech long enough to have heard every excuse for a stalled transformation, and almost none of them are ever “the leaders weren’t ready.” But that’s usually the real one. Louisa just says it out loud, which is exactly why I wanted her on the show.

You’re a chapter, not the book.

This was the line of the episode for me.

“You are a chapter in a book. You are not the book yourself.”

She was talking about leaders who show up, change the logo, shuffle the boxes on the org chart, and call it transformation. Meanwhile the tenures keep getting shorter, so the next person shows up and does the same thing before anything takes root.

If you’ve worked in retail for more than five minutes, you’ve watched this happen. Probably more than once. A new font is not going to fix your business, and Louisa has zero patience for pretending otherwise.

We’re automating our own mess.

Okay, this one made me a little uncomfortable, in a good way.

Louisa’s take is that most companies are using AI to automate broken experiences faster than ever. Hand a team a shiny new tool, tell them to do their job better, and they will. They’ll get very efficient at their own little slice of the customer journey while staying completely blind to the four other teams touching that same customer.

Her example was almost too real.

• Customer service is measured on closing the case fast.

• Sales is measured on the upsell.

• One cancels what the other just booked, over and over, because nobody owns the actual outcome.

• Now bolt AI onto that.

• Congratulations, you’ve made the mess run faster.

That’s the whole trap with AI in retail right now, and hardly anyone is talking about it this plainly.

The green dashboard is lying to you.

This is the part I keep coming back to.

Louisa said the problem isn’t measurement, it’s mistaking measurement for progress. And oof. Guilty.

We’ve all felt that dumb little hit of joy when the number turns green.

She’ll ask you what that green number actually did for the business, and half the time, a red number would have produced the better outcome. Measuring your goals is measuring the past.

I’ve defended a green dashboard or two in my life. I’m not proud of it. Haven’t we all?

What I walked away with.

🎙️Retail Transformers, Season 2, Episode 7: The Leadership Capacity Gap | Louisa Loran on Why Retail Transformation Stalls in the AI Era

There’s a whole stretch on luxury we didn’t get to here, where Louisa makes the case that luxury stopped being a category and became the baseline everyone expects now. And you know wee get into this deep since Casey would never let a good luxury retail discussion pass us by!

There are four leadership behaviors Louisa uses that reorganized how I think about who’s actually built to transform and who’s going to stall. And Casey pushed her on who’s winning in retail right now, which got an answer that surprised both of us.

I’m not giving all of that away. Go listen. It is a podcast after all!

What I took with me is simpler than I expected.

Know what you’re actually great at and bring more of that.

Get curious enough to admit you don’t have all the answers anymore. That second one is the hard part, especially if your whole career was built on being the smartest person in the room. That’s the unlearning. That’s the whole game.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube. Then go buy the book!

Your Turn.

If you lead anything in retail right now, or you want to, this is the episode I’d put at the top of your list. Louisa made me uncomfortable and hopeful in the same breath, which is a rare combination.

Listen to or watch the full conversation with Louisa at retailrazor.com, then do what she asks every leader she works with to do. Ask yourself what it would take to change your mind.

New here? Subscribe to the Retail Razor Substack for the highlights, the arguments, and the bonus content we don’t put anywhere else.

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Comment on this newsletter or join the conversation on LinkedIn! Your insights may help shape the topics we explore next.

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Until next time! Stay sharp. Be Bold. And Transform Retail!

Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Retail Transformers