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This week on The Retail Razor Show Casey and I sat down with Allison Varone, who runs marketing for Campari America. If you don’t know the name, you absolutely know the portfolio. Aperol. Campari. Wild Turkey. Grand Marnier. Espolòn. She’s spent more than 20 years in wine and spirits, and she has the receipts on how people actually drink right now, not how the trend pieces say they do. And the trend pieces, it turns out, have been wrong about the big one.
What two days at The Lead Summit taught us about AI in retail, GEO, and the conversations nobody's having.
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.
Here is the short version.
A room packed with the people actually running retail right now, from Anthropologie and Talbots to Hey Dude, Olaplex, and Loop, and almost every single conversation found its way back to AI.
Shocking, I know.
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.
Every AI project built to replace people is failing.
This theme kept showing up, and honestly it made me feel a little less crazy.
Every story on stage about using AI to cut headcount was a failure story.
Every one.
Meanwhile every story about using AI to make the existing team better was a win.
Same technology, opposite result, and the only variable that mattered was whether a human stayed in the loop.
My favorite example was a retailer proudly reporting 40 percent ticket deflection in customer service. Big number. Looks gorgeous in a board deck. Then somebody checked, and it turned out customers were hanging up on the bot and calling right back to reach a human. The tickets were technically closed. Call resolution times went down. But, customers were furious.
The metric was a magic trick.
Somebody compared this whole moment to when spreadsheets first showed up in business. A handful of people learned how to use them, and suddenly those were the people everybody wanted to hire.
AI is that exact thing again.
The folks on your team who actually learn the tools are about to be golden. Casey and I have some opinions about who is and is not doing this work, and we get into it on the episode.
People are the new luxury, and I will (briefly) take questions.
Casey called this one a decade ago and would like the record to reflect that.
Here’s the thing nobody on a panel wants to say into a microphone. You hit a point in your day where you have had it with AI and you just want a human. We all do it constantly. Casey colorfully admitted she would happily launch her laptop across the room rather than answer one more cheerful little “did that solve your issue?” prompt.
Anthropologie called their stores the heartbeat of the brand. Primark dropped a brand health question I can’t stop chewing on:
if your brand went away today, would anyone care?
Go ahead and ask that about your own brand. If the answer comes slowly, congratulations, you found your to-do list priority.
The brands getting this right are letting AI handle the volume and saving their humans for the moments that actually matter. Talbots is a great example, and the number hiding behind it genuinely surprised me. That one I am saving for the show. Go listen.
Half your customers are already shopping with AI. But do they see you?
Not “about to be.” Already are. Roughly half of consumers are using AI for product discovery, and about half of those are buying off the back of it. (Yes, there are questions on how this is measured. We get into it on the show).
And yet a wild number of brands have done close to nothing about generative engine optimization, the work of making sure AI actually understands and recommends your brand.
Right now it’s something like 5 percent of traffic and 80 percent of the hallway conversation. That gap is the whole opportunity. Holiday is coming fast.
The brands that move now will take share from the brands that wait, and the brands that wait will be writing a very sad recap of 2026 in January.
Casey ran some tests asking LLMs about real brands and the results were rough. The models could not reliably keep Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Lauren by Ralph Lauren straight. If a brand that famous gets blurred, picture what is happening to yours right now while you read this.
The grey swans nobody wants to talk about.
This was the heaviest stretch of the two days, and it came out of a session on grey swans delivered by David Katz, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Randa Apparel & Accessories.
Black swans are the things you cannot see coming.
Grey swans are the ones you absolutely can see coming and choose to ignore, which is so retail it hurts.
The examples landed hard. GLP-1 drugs and what they quietly do to how people shop and what they buy. The projection that by 2028 there will be more Americans over 65 than under 18. Supply chains built around a single country, or in one memorable case a single road with one way in and one way out. Randa’s CEO summed up the lesson in a line that stuck with both of us:
a business built around a single geography isn’t lean, it’s exposed.
We dig into all three on the episode, plus a size-curve problem Casey raised that I had honestly never considered until she said it out loud.
The stuff we are keeping for the episode.
There are three more themes we pulled out that didn’t make this newsletter. The rewired store and what is finally replacing sales per square foot. Community over audience and why your brand story now has to teach the robots who you are. And the multi-platform, multigenerational reality where a 50 year old and a 30 year old shop the same floor for completely different reasons.
If you want those, plus the part where Casey and I openly disagree about influencers, that’s in the full episode.
What to do Monday morning
Two things, and they’re both free.
First, take every AI project you have running and drop each one into a pile: “replace people” or “help people.” Then kill the replace pile. The proof is already in, and you will thank yourself by day two.
Second, get your GEO started. Not perfect. Started. You have a few months before holiday, and that’s nowhere near as much runway as it sounds.
That’s the recap. The full episode goes deeper on all eight themes and includes the arguments that didn’t make it into this newsletter, because some things are better heard than read.
Listen to the full episode.
The Retail Razor Show, Season 6, Episode 7 BONUS episode: Retail Trends 2026 - 8 Signals From The Lead Summit
Listen to the full episode of The Retail Razor Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, YouTube, or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Transcripts and guest info at retailrazor.com.
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Sincerely,
Ricardo Belmar
The Retail Razor Show
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The Retail Razor Show is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, alongside Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Find us at RetailRazor on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram. For a full transcript of this episode, visit our retailrazor.com website!