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Casey and I just spent two days at The Lead Summit in New York, and I came home with the exact face you make when the whole industry changes lanes and forgets to use a turn signal. A room packed with the people actually running retail right now, and almost every single conversation found its way back to AI. The interesting part was not that everybody talked about AI. It was what they were willing to admit about it once the slides were off.
Robots Were Supposed to Take Retail Jobs. Someone Forgot to Tell the Data.
I have sat through a lot of conference sessions in the last two years, and they all run the same slide. A moody photo of a robot, a headline about AI coming for retail jobs, and a speaker nodding like they just personally invented weather. Casey and I have seen it enough times that we can mouth along.
Then we got Greg Buzek back on Data Blades for part two of our series, he pulled up the actual numbers, and the whole doom story fell apart in about ninety seconds.
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The stat that should end the debate.
The retailers deploying the most AI in their stores are not quietly trimming staff.
They are hiring.
Edge-current retailers, meaning the ones actually running modern store infrastructure, plan to add store associates at 70% versus 36% for everyone else.
The retailers growing sales the fastest are 115% more likely to be adding people.
That’s the opposite of what you’ve been promised at every keynote since 2023. And it’s not a rounding error. It’s the headline.
We have all seen this movie before.
Here’s the part that made me grin. None of this is new. Greg walked us back twenty-five years to the dawn of self-checkout.
Kroger took its best employees and had them teach customers how to use the machines. Then they moved the freed-up staff over to the hot food counters, the fresh bread, all the impulse stuff that actually makes money.
Sales went up.
Kmart bought the same machines, used them to cut labor, and the whole thing was a flop they bailed on fast.
Same technology. Two completely different decisions about what to do with people.
Twenty-five years later we’re running the exact same experiment with AI, and the retailers treating it as an excuse to thin the ranks are about to learn the Kmart lesson the hard way.
Missed Part 1 of this 3-part AI in Retail mini-series?
So what is an “augmented associate” anyway.
Fair question.
The short version is giving your store team tools that make them faster and smarter rather than handing them a pink slip.
A few of my favorites from the conversation:
Voice tools that work in the associate’s native language, so the person stocking your shelves can ask “how do I change the printer paper” and get an answer in the language they actually think in. Walmart has trained more than two million associates on AI tools. This is real, at scale, today.
A walkie-talkie moment at curbside pickup. The associate radios that the order is ready instead of walking off and leaving the customer standing there. Net promoter score jumps about 25%. Tiny change, big feeling.
Returns routing that tells the associate in seconds whether an item goes back on the shelf, back to the vendor, or straight to the next online order.
There’s a whole stretch on last mile delivery, restaurant handhelds, and why returns are secretly where the margin hides. I’m not going to spoil it here. That’s what the podcast episode is for.
The unglamorous truth nobody wants to fund.
Greg said the two things AI needs more than anything are the network and clean data. Not the shiny model. The plumbing. And he had the best line of the episode about retailers rushing generative AI on top of a mess:
all you are doing is making faster decisions that are wrong, and that can be devastating.
I’ve been saying some version of this for years and it never stops being true. Getting bad output faster does not help anybody.
Fix the boring stuff first, then go buy your robots.
What I actually think.
The retailers cutting store associates right now to look lean on a slide are the ones who will be playing catch-up for the next ten years.
The winners are doing the unsexy work.
They are connecting their people to data, handing them tools that are at least as good as what the customer is already holding, and getting the store network right before they spend a dime on anything flashy.
Augment your people. The data could not be clearer about who wins.
Other recent issues you may have missed:
🔊Hear the whole thing.
The Retail Razor: Data Blades, Season 2 Episode 8: “The Augmented Associate: Why AI-Ready Retailers Are Hiring More” with Greg Buzek of IHL Group
Part two of our 3-part AI in Retail series with Greg Buzek is live now on the Data Blades podcast. Casey and I get into the edge computing angle, the restaurant table-turn economics, and the returns numbers that genuinely surprised us.
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Stay sharp. Be data-driven. Harness AI.
Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor: Data Blades podcast
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