Digital Front Door

Ep. 2 - Turn Store Data Into Revenue

• Scott Benedict • Episode 2

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Want a smarter way to sort real retail change from the noise? We sit down with Ricardo Belmar, host of The Retail Razor, global retail influencer, and advisor, to unpack how leaders can pair timeless fundamentals with timely tech to drive measurable results. From the rise of retail media to AI on the sales floor and the coming wave of agentic commerce, we map what’s hype, what’s working, and what to do next.

We start with the origin of The Retail Razor and its mission: cut through clutter and focus on outcomes. Ricardo explains how the pandemic accelerated collaboration, why retailers unintentionally became tech providers, and how high-margin retail media exploded by competing with legacy channels more than with Amazon. He shares where brands still struggle, comparable metrics, standardized buying, and in-store integration, and how connected TV and first-party data can unlock scale.

Then we dive into AI with a human touch. Associates need instant, credible answers, not laggy apps. Voice-driven AI that surfaces product knowledge through tools teams already use can boost confidence and conversion, while automation trims low-value tasks. We move beyond efficiency to possibility: solution selling at scale, curated baskets, and guided discovery that lift average order value. Ricardo stresses the playbook for faster, better rollouts, cross-functional buy-in, realistic pilots outside “friendly” test stores, and iterative deployment at 80 percent readiness.

Looking ahead, agentic commerce is poised to become a new channel with low adoption friction and high convenience, not a replacement for stores or websites. Expect experiential retail to regain momentum as storytelling and community pull shoppers back in. The throughline remains constant: product, price, place, promotion, people, and process, supported by tech that proves its worth in customer experience and operating metrics.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review. Your feedback helps us keep the conversations sharp and useful.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Digital Front Door. I'm Scott Benedict. I'm thrilled today to welcome a friend and a fellow member of the Rethink Retail Top Retail Experts Group, as well as a fellow member of the Retail Wire Brain Trust, and someone that I deeply respect as a retail thought leader without throughout the retail community. And that is my good friend Ricardo Belmar. Ricardo is the host of the Retail Razor show, a recognized global retail influencer, an advisor to Rethink Advisory, and an active voice on shaping the future of our industry. He also brings a unique academic perspective through his work with George Mation University's Center for Retail Transformation, which I find is an interesting parallel to my own time leading the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas AM. So we have that in common as well. And I think together we've both seen firsthand how academia and industry really can cross-pollinate and work together to shape the future leaders of retailing. And so, Ricardo, welcome to the Digital Front Door. We're so excited to have you here today. Oh, thank you, Scott. It's exciting to be here. Very good. Let me kind of start off and maybe uh if anybody uh in our audience has not heard uh of the Retail Razor brand or your podcast before. I know it's a well-respected voice in the industry, but I'm kind of curious if you could kind of share with the audience a little bit about it. What inspired you to create that podcast and what the Razor metaphor uh means to you in terms of kind of cutting through the clutter of what's happening in the industry?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. Happy to share a little bit here. So if I kind of looking back, you know, into my background, I've been serving the retail industry in some capacity professionally for quite some time, and over the past two decades now. And you know, I reached a point in that career where I was leading product marketing product management for a managed services company, where of course retail represented well over 40% of the customer base we have. And because of that role, obviously I wanted to understand uh better the needs of retailers and to help define the new services we offered. And this was, I think, a time where most technology providers, you know, we we had a tendency to think of, well, here's what we can do with a technology. So let's figure out how to sell that and apply it to a customer, right? Rather than what I think is the better way to go, which is to say, let me put myself in my customer's shoes and understand what's the challenge they're trying to solve, uh, and then work back from that and say, well, how could we do something useful that can help them overcome that challenge and give them a solution? So um this also happened to be a time when I think it was what I consider the early days of what we all think of now as B2B thought leadership and the influencer space, where you know, I could probably count on my fingers at the time how many quote influencers and experts there were posted on LinkedIn at the time, where now, you know, there's an endless number of people uh doing that as you know. Um and so, you know, by by doing that, um, you know, I kept doing that for a while and and you know, doing more and more of that. It was obviously very helpful and beneficial in terms of getting clarity right on what retailers needed uh and how we could help them uh with technology solutions. Of course, I I've always been on that technology side of things in retail. So then, of course, you know, I took that experience with me to other roles, but then of course the pandemic happened. And I I really felt that was a crossing point for retail. It really became clear to me then that retailers really couldn't continue to work within these silos. Um and I know lots of people, right? We talk about internal silos to retailer organizations, but I really felt that up until then it was very common for one retailer to look at their operations and and want to keep a lot of that functionality a secret because for competitive reasons, right? Because they didn't want other retailers to know how to do the same thing they were doing uh because that could give, you know, put them in a competitive disadvantage. And I really felt that at that point it was becoming more important that there needed to be more sharing of knowledge, more collaboration to go the next step and to really overcome these completely new, hadn't been seen before challenges that the pandemic brought to the industry. So I at the time I started a quota show on the Clubhouse app, which you may remember Clubhouse used to be quite popular, right, during the pandemic. It's kind of lost its popularity since then. But uh, at the time, I brought together a group of uh five other retail experts who we were all doing the same thing and said, you know, let's take a moment each week and let's tackle a new topic that we think matters for retailers and talk about why it matters. And from that higher level perspective, not so much, you know, an executional level thing that says, oh, here are how I'm how I'm going to tweak my product pages on my e-commerce site to get a tenth of a percent higher conversion. No, this was more about, you know, strategically thinking if I'm a C-suite executive at a retailer, what do I need to be thinking about? I see these new technologies coming. And I've always thought retail as an industry can often get distracted by the latest, shiniest new toy that comes along in technology and lose sight of where it makes sense to apply it. So that's what we tried to focus on. And as the Clubhouse app kind of started fading from popularity, I realized, you know, this would really make a great podcast uh for that same audience. So that's where the retail razor show was born from that. Um, you know, that it really just came from that what I felt was a need at the time to do that, to foster more knowledge, sharing, more collaboration. And and and the Razor metaphor isn't, yeah, I think is probably a pretty direct kind of thing. It's you know, our whole premise was to cut through the clutter, cut through the noise, uh, on that basis that, you know, there's so much content out there. Uh, and and I can say this as you know, a technology vendor, and so many rules that I've had in that space, that we all do it, right? We all produce endless amount of content to promote why our solution is the greatest thing since sliced bread and why everybody should have it. And and rightfully, I mean, you know, that that's what we should do. It's what all the technology vendors should do. But as on the retailer side, I mean, it's it's hard to sift through that, right? And to understand, you know, you need another voice that helps you understand why it matters, right? What's the business outcome that the technology is going to bring to you that you should care about? So that's so that's the perspective where we come from on the show. And now today we've actually expanded it to four different shows from there, uh, each covering a different uh a different theme. So we have uh, you know, there's the main show that takes that approach. We have a show we call Data Blades that really focuses on data insights around customer experience based on research, where we usually partner with an analyst or someone who has a data source like that that we can zero in on. We have a show called Blade to Greatness, where we focus on leadership skills and leadership development, uh, which we think is really important in this industry. And then the newest one that we won't only have two episodes out so far called Retail Transformers, where we focus more on the individuals that have done unique transformative things that are really, you know, they're changemakers, they're they're disrupting the industry, and they want to share that knowledge. So keeping with the whole theme of collaboration and sharing, we hope that uh listeners can learn from that.

SPEAKER_00:

That that is awesome. And you know, it feels like uh yes, there is a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of folks who have opinions, and the the way I think that that you frame it with those those four different shows is really narrowed in on where the pressure points are, where are the the things that the industry kind of needs. So I'm excited that you take that approach, and and I I think it makes a lot of sense. I also think that if if there's a silver lining in the pandemic, and I wouldn't wish going through that uh upon uh anyone, is that it did accelerate some trends that were already happening in our industry. That's true. It's happening a little bit faster uh as a result of that. Yeah. And I think it's bringing about this integration between physical and digital and tech as well as business objectives. And I think that's a healthy thing. Yeah. Because speaking of tech, you've you've often said that retailers are becoming tech providers in their own right. And I'm kind of curious, how do you see the evolution of a traditional merchant or merchandising organization into a tech-enabled service provider? And do you do you have a vision for what retailers in your view are really kind of doing that the best or the way that you would suggest others model themselves after?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's a great, great question. In in a way, this is something I think is uh fairly unintentional in a sense that uh you know, a traditional retailer, they want to be good at selling a traditional basic core retail function, right? Serving customers, merchandising, you know, keeping costs low so you can increase margin across all these things that we know. But what's happened, I think your point earlier about things that were accelerated from the pandemic, I think is uh very much a part of this, where the technology has become so ingrained in so much of these operational processes within a retailer, uh, where things that in the past could have been done manually, and sure there are some retailers where things may still be done manually via spreadsheets versus other things. Uh, that's that's a whole different topic. But but uh putting that one point aside, that the technology is so ingrained and so much a part of it that as part of this uh changeover, if you will, of retailers sharing some of this knowledge and sharing the learnings, you find some retailers realizing, you know, we've gotten good at this. Other retailers could benefit. This could be incremental revenue for us if we offered it to other businesses. Um I think probably this is likely not going to come as a surprise to many people, you know, who are the two best retailers at doing this? It's Walmart and Amazon. Uh because obviously they have the most resources, they have the deepest pockets to enable them to do this. But you see so many examples of that where uh, you know, whether it's the ability, it's on the logistics side, right? Obviously, Amazon is such a logistics machine uh and offering that to other sellers. Uh, even Walmart doing this with Walmart local for delivery. Um and then retail media, I think, was really born from this as well, in a sense, right? That probably was the first one that initiated this and caused many retailers to realize there are other things we're doing because we have all this customer data, because we have all this internal knowledge, that if we shared that, it could actually be a revenue source for us, another incremental revenue source. So I think that's where that's come. Now, at the same time, I do think that it isn't necessarily implying that um retail has become just another technology business. I think it's a part of it, but it retail is still a people business. It's still about the people and serving customers. And technology is a tool. It's a means to an end in any case. Even, you know, when we talk about AI, for example, which is what everyone's talking about now in retail, it's still a tool. And I think that's one thing that I find fascinating is uh, you know, in fact, the recent event I was at where it came up in a session uh I was leading where someone mentioned uh in in this work workshop session, you know, where they see AI projects fail is when people get so overcome with AI being the shiny object in the room, they forget that they're still managing a technology deployment project. And it's no different than managing any other deployment project. All the same project management requirements are still there and you still need to do them. Just because it's AI doesn't mean you get to toss those aside and run free. Um because it won't it won't succeed otherwise. So I think that that's still there. And and there are great examples, even, you know, I don't I won't just uh you know call out Walmart and Amazon. I think even with AI in particular, there are lots of I'd say specialty brands who I think are doing really interesting things there. I you know, two that come to mind recently Bath and Body Works and Ralph Lauren, where they've integrated AI agents uh as very advanced chatbots into their mobile apps to help customers navigate product selection. I think those are are super interesting additionals where they've made great use of the technology.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and I think one of the keys to success, and you kind of touched on this, is it's not uh technology for technology's sake, is how can technology be deployed to improve the customer's experience, make the business more efficient, lower the cost, increase speed. And and so if you continue to keep that in in view, uh you probably are thinking about technology the right way. And one of those things that has also been an incredibly uh fast growing part of retail has been retail and media. I'm kind of curious from your vantage point, what's driving that momentum uh and where are retailers still kind of uh uh struggling to take that platform and use it in the most effective and efficient way from your perspective.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. Retail meaning is actually one of my favorite uh topics in retail right now to go through. Uh I I think for me, the driver is pretty clear. It's about the incremental high margin revenue that retailers want to achieve from it. I think retailers saw what Amazon did uh on their e-commerce marketplace when they introduced ads and how much revenue that was generating for them. And it's obviously it's not insignificant. I mean, it's pretty sizable revenue. Now, I I think where a lot of people, in my view, sort of lose the script on this is that when we people start talking about how um the challenge of taking retail media market share from Amazon. And I take a very different view on that. I I claim that for most retailers, uh you're not really competing with Amazon's retail media because the size, the retail media total addressable market is not fixed. Uh it's growing. And because it's growing, there's always going to be more room for others. Now, sure, it would be great as a retailer, right? If you could claim, oh, I'm I've grabbed 10% of Amazon's retail media robbery. Wouldn't anyone would like to do that? But but do you need to? I mean, I look at the question as is that really the only measure of success for a retail media? And I think the answer to that is no. What really the measure of success is how much incremental revenue can you bring in from the brands that you sell, totally independent of what Amazon does, independent of what Walmart does. I mean, it's true that between those two, that's I forget what the number is, but it's something like 75 to 80 percent of the current size of the retail media uh pie, if you will. But that doesn't mean that everyone else is fighting for that tiny amount because the size is growing. I I view this more as you're really competing with legacy media. It's you're competing with broadcast TV, cable, print, radio, all these forms that continue to get dollars. We don't often think about them, but uh ad people do uh because they're still buying that capacity, right? And so you're trying to get mind share of the advertising people, category managers, right? You're those are the people you're trying to convince to work with you. Now, I think the challenge for retailers is it's not just enough to create capacity, right? It's not just enough to have ad units you can sell to these brands. There's a lot of other things the brands expect to get for their dollar there, which which of course they're getting in other mediums. They want to know how am I going to measure effectiveness of this? Right. Um, now everyone likes to focus on return on ad spend, but I think there are other but better metrics. That's probably yet another discussion on that. But it's really more about how well can uh a brand manage this, because I think from the brand's perspective, there could be 50 retail media networks they could choose to participate in apart from an Amazon or a Walmart. And how do they make that choice? How do they measure it in a way that convinces them that their target audience is going to see this and it's gonna bring them, you know, it's gonna make their campaign successful. Those are the things that I think retailers are still haven't quite solved yet. There's not consistency, there are so many different platforms. You know, again, the retailer, a given retailer may say, here are the tools I'm making available to you, here's the data I'm making available. But the brand wants to say, that's great. How do I compare this to the five other retailers that are offering me retail media on five completely different systems? So how do I make that comparison to know which one do I want to give more dollars to? Um so I think those are the more challenging issues that there's still there's still a struggle there. There still needs to be more work done, I think, to resolve that. But um I I still think this is there's plenty of room still uh for retail media. I think we haven't tapped in-store as a segment. Most of everything I just said is still talking about the online digital component. Um in-store media, uh, you know, I I remember I in one of my past roles, we used to market digital signage solutions, which um, you know, I'll say back in the day, but this is really not any older than like 2016, 2017, 2015. But we didn't know better in those days to call it a retail media network, but maybe if we did, we would have sold more of it. Um of course the challenge is back then, all the digital signage providers were selling to CIOs when really the the mission should have been to sell the CMOs, as we do now for these content networks.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's the thing to your point about competing with Amazon, is if we take Whole Foods and set them off to the side for just a moment, Amazon largely doesn't have stores, certainly not have the fleet of stores that a lot of others do. Right. And so to the degree that those retailers that have both stores and an online presence can take advantage of monetizing store traffic in addition to monetizing online traffic, that's my view is is when retail media truly uh reaches its its full potential.

SPEAKER_01:

Uh right. Yeah, and and we're seeing in really interesting partnerships there too, where retailers are branching out to connected TV solutions, to streaming video uh partnerships. So connecting the dots between the data they have uh to the data all these other sources can provide to really paint a broader picture uh for advertisers on who the target customer can be. So I think there's there's still plenty of potential that hasn't been tapped yet.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that uh it feels that feels about right. I'm curious, you mentioned AI earlier, and of course, we we can't have a podcast without mentioning AI somewhere in the conversation. I've heard you talk about the balance between AI and human connection in retail. And I'm thinking specifically about the frontline associate, the the person who's out there dealing with customer and and how they use AI-based tools to become effectively engineered influencers in that interaction with a customer in a store. And I'm curious from your view, how how do you do that? How does a retailer do that? How does the the store associate do that without losing authenticity? And how does that human interaction still become uh tech enabled, but still a human interaction?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I think for me that the fundamental point here is that as a consumer walking into the store, you know, you you have a fundamental expectation that anyone you interact with in that store should know more than you do going into the store to help you make a purchase decision. I think that's that's a fundamental principle every customer has walk into a store that unfortunately many customers walk out of the store feeling unfulfilled in in that point, right? That they end up feeling, no, I knew more than those people did, right? And then they're disappointed. So I think there's a fundamental need there where I also think it's realistically, we ask so we ask those store team members to do so many tasks in a store. And and the fact is, most customers don't even contemplate what are all the tasks. If you haven't worked in a store, you just don't know how many things that you know keep you busy that have nothing to do with working with a customer in the moment that keeps the store running. And all of those things still have to happen. So asking the store team member on top of that to learn everything there is to know about what you're selling in the store can be a pretty tall order and it's probably unrealistic in most cases. Um, obviously there are there are some segments where you know that it's a fundamental part of the experience. You know, if we were talking uh luxury goods and luxury apparel, for example, sure, you know, that those store employees are gonna pride in themselves and how much they know about every individual item they're selling, putting a look together for someone. And so and that maybe is a special case. But for the most part, you know, that's where technology fills a need. And it has to do that, uh, and where I think AI can really make that need filled better. Um and there are lots of solutions out there. You know, there was a time when we talked a lot about clientelling solutions, right? Enabled by a mobile device that a store employee would have that could bring up whatever information that the customer was okay with them bringing up about past purchase histories and so forth. Uh, and that could give them access to product knowledge. And there was some amount of success with this, I think. Uh, but you know, where are the challenges in that? Well, much like in launching an e-commerce site, the challenges in how do you get all the product information? How do you package it in a way through that presentation layer that the store associate can access quickly enough? Because one thing that I used to do when uh retailers I work with who were challenged with those kinds of deployments, I asked them, well, have you put yourself in the shoes of that store associate and used this app that you're giving them anytime there's a delay in the app, and you know, count the difference between a one-second delay and a three-second delay, and then pretend you're the customer standing there waiting for that answer. And I I would demonstrate this to uh you know a CIO, for example, and say where they thought, well, it's only two seconds. Okay, but if you're the customer, two seconds is one, it's a lifetime two. Do you have the answer yet? As a customer, right? You the answer has to be now, not in three seconds right now. And so that was a challenge. And part of the challenge for the store associate is the interface of whatever you're presenting to. And so, what's a more natural way to do it? Well, wouldn't it be great if instead of that uh your store team member, and I'll I'll use an example here, as happens to be a few solution providers I know that do this. What if they, you know, if you you're in a big box store that uses two-way radios, right? And every store has a radio. Well, what if you could just use that radio and ask a verbal question to an AI that give just immediately gives you the answer that you can repeat back to the customer? There's no delay in that, essentially. Uh, and those solutions exist. I mean, I've I've worked with uh a few uh couple that do that, where the um it's literally just a voice input to an LLM that has access to all the product information and it just gives you back the answer. And then the stories I can just repeat that to the customer, and you can have this back and forth as interactive as you need it to be to satisfy that customer. And it's very natural, right? It's it's you're not you don't have to learn anything new. You already know how to ask questions. There's nothing new to learn you know how to use the radio. So there are ways like that that you can augment through technology, the store team, uh, with that. And then, you know, I mentioned earlier, you know, one of the things I think retailers are really focusing on uh with AI is, you know, how can we be more efficient? Well, at the store, right? All those mundane tasks that you ask store team members to do just to keep the store running, how many of those can be automated or can you make the process simpler so that instead of each step taking five minutes, it takes 10 seconds because you've AI enabled it. Those are the opportunities I think to do that. Um, and I think you know, whether you're building a solution with uh, you know, an AI like a ChatGPT or a Microsoft Copile, I mean, all of these have toolkits that people can build solutions around to do just that, to make those processes easier and more efficient. Yeah. And that frees up the store team member to solve a customer problem.

SPEAKER_00:

And you know, it's interesting, so much of technology is pointing at helping a customer find an item. And if you grew up in the consumer electronics industry like I did, we were taught this concept of solution to selling, which is not the item, but the group of items that someone needs to solve whatever their need state is. And I'm surprised that through different elements of retail, apparel and an outfit or food and beverage for an occasion or for certain dietary needs, that nobody's thinking about how AI can solve a solution for a customer and actually drive a higher average ticket and a full basket of purchase, not just an individual uh item. And I guess that's where merchants uh challenge technology people the appropriate way. And I'm happy to make my conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Yeah. I mean, I think part of the challenge is because AI is new, I think the desire that, and this makes sense. I mean, the you know, your your executive leaders at a retailer, they want to see where we can use AI to get the quickest return, right? Because they they realize there's an investment to be made here uh for this technology. Where can we get the quickest return on that investment? And usually that's going to come from where's an existing process, an existing function that we can make it more efficient. So the overall cost of completing that function goes down. And that's where we focus the AI on. But you know, this example that we're talking about is really more about what's something new that we otherwise couldn't do that we can use AI to help us enable us to now accomplish with a customer, uh, which has the net effect, of course, of bringing higher average order value, more revenue in at the at the top line. And those, I think those are going to be the next things that we see more and more of, I think.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, one of the things I've heard you talk about is that amid all this innovation, all this technology, uh retailing is still about fundamentals, product, price, place, promotion, people, processes, which again, as a merchant, does my heart uh good. How do you think retailers think about grounding themselves appropriately in these basics while still using technology as an enabler or as a tool set? Uh are they thinking about it the right way, in your view?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that the challenge is that in in retailers, there's always been a little bit of a tendency to get enamored with the latest and greatest new technologies that that shiny object syndrome, right? And see, and you know, obviously, and it's not just because retailers do this, obviously the technology vendors kind of promote this idea because they want to sell more. And and you know, everyone's doing what their job needs them to do. Um, but I I I think the key is that retailers are have to understand, right, that the business hasn't fundamentally changed with this, right? The technology is a tool, and that tool either allows you to uh, as we said before, do something I can already do, but do it better, either in a more efficient way and or a more productive way, um, or it allows me to do something I simply couldn't do before because it was either cost prohibitive or uh I had some other technical limitation that prevented me from doing this, that now this new technology allows me to do that. And that has the ability to either lower my cost basis or introduce new incremental revenue. Um and implementing these things, just like anything else, it's still a technology project. And every project has to follow certain rules and constraints to make sure that you successfully deploy it. Um, you know, that to me, a classic example is for retailers are if I'm a large retailer and I have hundreds of stores, you know, what's my process? I usually try something out in some kind of internal lab somewhere. Then I say, okay, we need to try this in a store, in a real store environment. So every retailer usually has a handful of stores that they call their test stores. And the people at those test stores, they know they're the test stores. So they tend to be people who embrace something new. They don't dislike the idea of having new things. They're hopeful that it will make life better for them. So they're more receptive to doing this. So you you try it out at those test stores. And I find that nine times out of 10, if that goes well and it likely will, uh, you automatically think, okay, now the next step is we tried it at these two test stores. Let's go to 15 stores, right? And see what happens. But how do you pick those stores? Right. Is I think to me the the number one question that doesn't often get asked. Yeah. Because you you you favorite the places that you're used to having worked with previously for another deployment. So again, it's you you end up not seeing the issues that may come up because at the end of the day, every store is unique. There, as much as you try to make them cookie-cutter, there's always something different. Even if the something is just that it's different people. And and you never know if someone who you tell them to do A, B, and C when you use this technology, they end up forgetting so, oh, is that A, B, C, or A, C, B that I'm supposed to do that? And and something that happens that you didn't expect, right? So you miss some of those learnings. And then when you get to, you know, I'm going out to 50 stores and now you're surprised by things that didn't work because you didn't see it before, and you ask, well, why didn't I see it before? And so so those are common challenges, and none of that has anything to do with what the technology is. Right. Any of that can happen with any technology.

SPEAKER_00:

And you know, it occurs to me as you were talking that uh one of the things a concept I learned through my e-commerce experience is this concept of user acceptance testing, that before any technology, any software was considered ready for implementation, the people, uh some of the people who actually use it got to put their hands on it and give feedback to the developers on that. And and I I I mentioned that to ask you this question that is, is that historically uh Uh, CIOs or CTOs were the ones who were the decision makers uh solely within their budget on technology investments. And it occurs to me that today it'd be better if not only they're involved, but but operators, merchants, marketers, logistics, whomever the technology touches, ought to be a component of the decision-making process. My question for you is do you think that light bulb moment has happened in most of the retailers that you interact with, or is that still I'm kind of dreaming about that, that's about how the real world works. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I I think it's happening more than it used to, uh, for sure. I think that I think there are more retailers that are doing that. And I think the the way you you one way that that surfaces is when we see successful technology deployed by retailers and we hear about it, and if we don't work directly with them, I think that's been a key component is that they already learned that lesson. And I think again, you know, you when you mentioned earlier, you know, some of the things that were accelerated during the pandemic. I think, in my view, one thing that I've said to many CIOs, I think if there's a positive they can extract out of something that, of course, was so terrible. But the positive is that IT departments learned that every new project doesn't require six months to deploy. You can't actually deploy things in six weeks. That's true. Right. And I was amazed. Exactly. Yeah. And think about how many retailers in six weeks' time suddenly deploy curbside pickup when they didn't have that before. Even if that just meant I bought an orange bucket from Home Depot, put some cement in it, and the and put a sign in there that said, park here, pick up here. Um, and it was as simple as that. Um, you know, I joke about it, but it's it's true. I mean, so many retailers put that together in six weeks. Um I think the corollary to that was that, well, the reason you took six months before is because you insisted on getting to 100% before you considered rolling it out company wide. And uh I think this new process caused Iron to realize we can get 80% of the way there, roll out selectively, gather feedback, and start iterating to get another 5% down the road and another 5%. And we'll eventually get to whatever we want to consider 100%. But at least we started getting benefit and value six weeks in rather than having to wait six months to get the first value out of it. So I think that was one of the main things. And that I think is reflected in what you were just asking that you know, that requires going outside of IT. It requires getting buy-in from your operations team, it requires getting the merchant to be bought, it requires CMOs to be bought in, depending on what the particular project is.

SPEAKER_00:

And that means that you know this is naturally happening more and more, I think, because of that, which is good and and and healthy and again, a a positive that came out of a negative uh experience. You know, I mentioned at the at the beginning uh uh of this episode that you and I have both been uh involved uh somewhat in in the retail aspects of academia. And one of the things I'm curious about your thoughts, it won't shock you that I have thoughts on this, is are the skills and the leadership traits that future leaders of retailing, no matter what functional area they're involved in, are do you think universities are appropriately focused on what skills future leaders in retailing need, or do they need a little nudge from us in industry to make sure that they're developing all the skills, some of which are evergreen and don't change, but an awful lot that do for where retailing is headed. I'm curious what your view is.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think I have a fairly mixed view on that. Um, because that there are, I think, some that are more effective at than others at doing that. And in some ways, you know, the the challenge I see that the greatest is, you know, when I talked earlier about the knowledge sharing, um, you know, that requires a lot of clarity and communication to be able to do that effectively. And I do find that often what gets lost uh in in the university is because there's just so much technical knowledge that we're trying to convey to students, that it's these other, you know, we usually call them the soft skills, right? Around communication and the ability to build community and so on. Um, the ability to present clearly and deliver an argument in a convincing way, you know, and also be willing to take feedback, right? Those those are all things that I think many people learn that in their first few roles, how to do that. And that's an area where, and I wish I had the right answer for it, but I think a lot of it, in my view, has to do with a lack of time, I think, because we try to put so much into a degree program to get students ready technically for the field that they're going into, that there just isn't enough time to do some of these other things. So finding ways to weave that in, I think would be really important. Uh and and that's where I think you know, things like the the Center for Reading Technology I supported at uh at GMU and the work that you've done. I think that's why those are important because those centers, I think, have an opportunity to bring that in and weave that into the programs at the schools. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And admittedly, there's there's the practical aspects of, well, what do we take out? Exactly. Right. Yeah. And no, they still took out in four years, still have that narrow hours. Exactly. Yeah. But but how do you evolve that? Because there are some elements of retailing and business in general, yeah, that are evergreen that don't change. How do you how you strike that balance between the skills that haven't changed and the new skills that that are being introduced? I think retailing probably challenges academia harder than maybe other fields of endeavor areas of study. So that is an interesting challenge. Yeah. Kind of curious uh as we kind of bring this to a close, what what in your view is the next big frontier, the next big challenge that retailers are facing, whether it's new channels of business, uh uh how to refine and improve in-store experiential aspects of retail, the next wave of tech, where where do you kind of see the biggest opportunity for retailers from your view, looking forward perhaps the next three to five years? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So on the technology side, I think the probably number one thing that's going to overwhelm people is this coming age of agentic commerce. Um and we didn't touch too much on that, but the but I'm viewing that as a new channel. Uh, I know there are some folks very enthusiastically uh viewing that as potentially replacing existing channels. Uh one of the events I was just asked, uh asked uh the provocative question with agentic commerce, do brands even need websites anymore? Uh, are consumers even going to bother going to websites if they have an agent that can do their shopping? And I think these are great questions to ask. And part of me wants to say right now that the challenge with any of these new things is how many consumers will adopt it and what drives and motivates that adoption. So while I do have now, I don't mean to sound negative on Agentec Commons, because I do think it is a absolutely legitimate channel, and there will be significant, you know, that that in my mind is potentially as game-changing as when e-commerce first came to be. Um, and I'm sure if we look back, there were plenty of people who thought, oh, this e-commerce, who's gonna buy these kinds of like, you know, there were plenty of people that said no one's ever gonna buy health and beauty products online. Come on. And now look at where we are. That's probably like, you know, but but even still, then you take the big broad picture view, e-commerce is still less than 20% of our total of total retail sales. So it did not take over the world, it did not eliminate stores completely, right? Not none of those predictions came to be. It became another channel, an important one for sure, but it became another channel. So I see something analogous for this agentic commerce. Um, and maybe another good comparison to make is you know, it wasn't too long ago, what, three years ago, that plenty of people were saying the metaverse is going to take over everything in commerce and everyone's gonna buy everything in these virtual environments. Stores are gone, e-commerce is gonna be totally different, it's all a metaverse. But but what happened? Well, other than the fact that it didn't happen, but what real I think what really happened is you know, that metaverse concept really required overcoming what I think is significant friction in the adoption process by consumers because it required buying new equipment, expensive equipment. So even if the costs had come down rapidly, it still would have been an expense that you don't need that expense to shop in any other channel because you already have access. So that's an inherent friction point there. Um and so, but right there, a difference with a gentic commerce is there is no new equipment I need. It's enabled by all the same, you know, my mobile device, my my laptop, everything I have now is already enabled for that. So that friction doesn't exist, unlike it did for Metaverse, which I think was the number one reason consumers didn't adopt, uh, because it's too complicated. And like we mentioned before, like the example I gave of the store employee using a voice interface, right, to get product information through an AI LLM. Well, for the consumer, no different, right? It's the same thing. So it couldn't be easier to use. So I think the question there is not whether consumers adopt, I think they will. It's where will they use it? Um, you know, do you expect is a consumer going to use in an agent like this to buy their next car without actually seeing it or sitting in it? I I don't know. I don't I don't think I would. I'm not sure that there are plenty of categories, you know, where it's just not gonna happen because you you can't most consumers can't conceive of buying that particular thing without seeing, touching, feeling it. Um so I think that's always gonna be a challenge. And that to me is if you can't overcome that, then that can't become the number one channel for sales speaking. That's why we'll still have stores, we'll still have physical sales, um, regardless. But so that to me is that that's probably the biggest from the technology side is is that coming. Um, you know, I mentioned before that the idea of retailers using AI to think of, well, what could I not do before that I can now do with this? I think that's going to be the next thing that we see in the next few years from a technology side. And then I also think that we uh is probably another thing to blame the pandemic on. Um we lost a lot of momentum on experiential retail in physical spaces from that. And when we sort of rebounded back after the pandemic and had a surge in people shopping in stores, it didn't need to be experiential, right? To get consumers to store, I think we lost some momentum there. I think the that that notion of experiential storytelling in retail as a means to get more consumers in through the front door to your store, I think we're gonna see more of that come back. And that's gonna be a new battleground, completely independent of what happens with the agentic commerce. I think we're just starting to see more separation uh in terms of product categories of which ones fall into which channels more frequently.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I got advice at uh one earlier point in my career that if you're you're struggling with uh a decision on what to do, uh uh start with a customer and work back, and you'll generally make the right decision. That was told to me in the context of being a merchant, but I think it applies uh across just about any area of retail, right? Including in tech. So absolutely. Yeah. So, Ricardo, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and and your insights uh with us. I think we've covered a lot of ground from retail media to AI to uh some of the fundamentals uh of retailing that never go out of style. Uh I'll put up on the screen now uh a slide that has a link to all of the podcasts that you mentioned earlier. And we will obviously encourage uh everyone uh to take a listen based on their interests. Uh, but I think that approach of having a couple different channels and a couple different interests is a really neat one. And I look forward to see how you and and the and the and the team continue to kind of unfold that, but focus it on communities of interest, which is a great way, I think, to approach it. So uh thank you for that. Thank you. All right. Well, that does it for this episode of the digital front door. Thank you for listening. I'm Scott Benedict. We'll see you next time.