Hey Retail Razor subscribers,
When I sat down to produce five recent episodes across the podcast network this past month, I wasn’t trying to prove anything. The point made itself. Different guests, different shows, different rooms, and every one of them landed in the same place on the question all of retail is arguing about right now.
Is AI coming for retail jobs, or isn’t it?
Here’s what I found. AI should serve people, not replace them. And the evidence is a lot less subtle than I expected it to be.
The numbers that should end the argument.
On Data Blades, Casey and I went back through IHL Group’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study with Greg Buzek. If AI were quietly deleting retail jobs, the retailers using the most of it would be the ones shrinking their store teams. They’re doing the reverse. The most AI-ready retailers are growing store headcount at 70% versus 36% for everyone else, and the fastest-growing retailers are 115% more likely to be adding people.
Greg calls it the augmented associate.
Use AI to make your people more capable, and suddenly they’re worth keeping. He traced the whole idea back to self-checkout, 25 years ago. Kroger trained its best people to teach shoppers, then moved that talent to the high-margin fresh counters. Kmart bolted in the machines and cut the labor.
Same technology, two philosophies, two very different endings.
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The CIO who lived it says AI is not the point.
Then I sat down with Julie Averill on Retail Transformers, and she gave me the leadership half of the answer. Julie was the global CIO who helped scale Lululemon from $2 billion to $10 billion, and she just wrote a book called Chief Impact Officer. Her line stuck with me.
AI doesn’t fix your culture, it reveals it.
Bolt it onto broken data and weak processes and you get a great demo and garbage results, like the AI that cheerfully told a retailer to stock winter coats in Miami. That, she says, is why most AI projects fail, per a recent MIT study. The tech is rarely the problem.
So if you’re tempted to use AI as a quiet way to shrink your team, her whole career says don’t. The work that makes transformation last is human:
Honest leadership about what’s changing.
The boring data foundation nobody claps for.
Developing your people so well you make yourself unnecessary.
Or as she puts it, AI is not the point. The people are.
The skills that survive get built on the retail sales floor.
On Blade to Greatness, Ron Thurston reminded me that the most future-proof skills in retail aren’t technical at all. They’re human.
Communication, empathy, reading a stranger and earning their trust in 90 seconds.
You don’t pick that up from a binder. You build it on the sales floor, one conversation at a time.
His take on AI is the healthy one. Let the machine carry the operational weight, the policy look-ups and the product specs, so your associates can spend their attention on the human standing in front of them. The technology buys back the time. What you do with that time is the whole game.
Two events, same line in the sand.
I watched the exact same split play out in person. At The Lead Summit in New York, the sharp brands were using AI to buy back the hours their teams lose to busywork, then pointing those hours straight at the things a machine can’t fake.
The ones automating the human connection out of the experience are going to spend next year wondering where the loyalty went.
Then at Zebra Technologies ZONE conference in Nashville, I sat down with two of their executives braced for a hardware pitch, and got something better. Their CTO, Tom Bianculli, kept circling one phrase: pragmatic AI for the frontline. My favorite example was nursing. Nurses lose 25 to 30 percent of a shift to documentation, and nobody went to nursing school to do paperwork. Put AI on the device to handle it and you hand a fifth of the day back.
James Poulton, who runs their mobile computing business, said the line I keep repeating: it’s a fallacy to think frontline workers don’t want tools. Take away your own laptop and phone, then go try to do your job.
Five rooms, one conclusion.
Nobody compared notes. Greg is reading research, Julie led IT for a 10-billion-dollar retail organization, Ron is coaching leaders, and the two events were a world apart.
They all arrived at the same place anyway.
The technology is identical no matter which retailer you look at. The philosophy is everything.
One group is handing their teams superpowers.
The other is calling layoffs efficiency and hoping nobody checks the data.
So if you lead a retail team and you’re staring at an AI budget this year, sit with one question.
Are you buying a tool to serve your people, or an excuse to replace them?
The data already told you which one pays off.
I would love to hear from you: : Hit the button to leave a comment and tell me where you've seen AI make a frontline job better.
Until next time… Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead!
With sincere gratitude,
Ricardo Belmar
Founder, The Retail Razor Podcast Network
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