Digital innovation and technology trends in retail

Sharing “some thoughts” about artificial intelligence with employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” as generative AI usage increases, according to a June letter.

While difficult to provide exact numbers on the potential impact, Jassy noted that “we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.” The executive added that AI and chatbot rollouts at the company, for example, will also mean people need to be doing other types of jobs than their current work.

Despite Amazon already having over “1,000 generative AI services and applications in progress or built” at the company, Jassy indicated that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential.

“We’re going to lean in further in the coming months,” the chief executive said. “We’re going to make it much easier to build agents, and then build (or partner) on several new agents across all of our business units and G&A areas.”

The executive said generative AI is the most transformative technology since the internet. Jassy encouraged employees to learn about and implement the use of generative AI to remain competitive at the company, which includes brainstorming how to be more productive with “scrappier teams.”

“Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well-positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company,” Jassy added.

In his letter, Jassy outlined several ways in which AI is already being used at Amazon to improve customer and seller experiences. Use cases include rolling out its next-generation personal assistant Alexa+, Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, services for sellers to generate detailed product pages and more.

Amazon isn’t alone in seeing AI’s potential in the retail industry.

Shoptalk’s spring conference in Las Vegas earlier this year featured numerous discussions about AI, including comments from companies such as Toys R Us, Foot Locker and Tapestry.

Walmart has also been “throwing the doors wide open to generative AI”, according to Senior Vice President of Enterprise Business Services David Glick. The mass retailer released a generative AI assistant named Sparky in June following the March debut of its AI assistant for merchants, dubbed Wally.

After two years exploring generative AI use, Walmart has embedded the technology across workflows, honing its deployment strategy and expanding the toolkit for associates and developers in the process.

“In 2023, we were like ‘we want to go all in with AI,’ but we didn’t really know what that meant,” David Glick, senior vice president of enterprise business services at Walmart, told Retail Dive’s sister publication CIO Dive. “There was no enterprise ChatGPT or enterprise Gemini and the data privacy element was not where it needed to be.”

Finding the balance between innovation and risk is a tension enterprise leaders know all too well. But friction isn’t viewed as a bad thing, Walmart executives said. Instead, the back-and-forth between technologists, information security pros, legal and compliance counterparts keeps the company on the right track. 

“We’re pushing and pulling every day," Glick said. "I’m negotiating [and] I’m working very hard to make AI approachable while our legal team and compliance team or InfoSec team are working very hard to make it safe. We spend a lot of time together, having direct and candid conversations.”

After all, no business wants to be in the news for a data privacy leak or AI-related fumble. But at the same time, executives see the value in pushing boundaries and being innovative. 

“We need to make sure that what we put in the hands of our users will not get them in trouble and will not get the company in trouble,” Glick said. “We’ve made a lot of progress on it over the last year, but it’s going to be an ongoing saga.”

One of the improvements over the last year is an ML platform called Element, which offers teams visibility into cost, governance and responsible practices while enabling scale and speed. 

“It allows only models that are compliant with our guidelines into production,” said Sravana Karnati, executive vice president of global technology platforms at Walmart. Guardrails also ensure privacy and information security standards are met.

As the company expanded developer access to coding assistance and completion tools in North America and India this year, the retailer has leaned on an existing multistage validation process as well as other guardrails to ensure accuracy and security standards are upheld. 

Code is tested for accuracy, information security compliance and lineage, Karnati said. “We check for all those things before the code is in production, and that does not change with generative AI tools. Humans are always in the loop.”

AI-powered tools also work in the background to inspect code, identify potential problems and add comments when appropriate. 

“We have created what we call a pipeline visualizer that allows developers to look at where the problems are with your deployment,” Karnati said. “Here, we also use generative AI to pinpoint what actually happened with the code, and the tool also suggests fixes.” 

Walmart recently added AI agents to the expanding developer toolkit. One of the agents is specifically designed to identify accessibility gaps in code. 

“We want to make sure that the services we put out on our e-commerce side are available for everybody to consume,” Karnati said. “Going back and retrofitting code that already exists and sifting through and identifying those gaps is a laborious and error-prone activity, so what better use case than that for an agent?” 

Working with AI

As the AI toolkit expands, the experience of Walmart’s workers is evolving. 

“We are seeing a huge step change in the way coding and software development is done — and not just as in generating the code, testing it, compiling it and deploying it, but it’s also our ability to run systems in production,” Karnati said. 

Developers have had to adjust to AI being embedded into the workflows.

Gartner predicts around three-quarters software engineers will use AI-powered coding assistants by 2028. AI use will also drive an upskilling surge, impacting around 4 in 5 engineers as the technology reshapes workflows and job functions. 

Expectations of software developers are on the rise, with many saying they feel pressure to deliver projects faster, according to a HackerRank report published in March. Developers have also voiced concerns about job security and development. 

“You absolutely need a distribution of developers,” Karnati said. “Whether it is early career engineers, mid-level engineers, senior engineers: you need all of them.”

Walmart offers its developers access to its Global Tech Academy where they can interact with a number of training resources. The retailer also pairs senior engineers with early career engineers or those with different skill sets. 

Technologists also connect with associates to help with prompt engineering and impart AI know-how.

“An engineer or data scientist or a savvy AI champion could go sit with you and say, ‘Here’s some of the problems where you might use it. Here’s some of the things it does well or doesn’t do well,’” Glick said. 

The goal is for AI to be ubiquitous and for associates to use it daily as part of their work. To do that, leaders are working to break down barriers to adoption and increase access points.

“We’re throwing the doors wide open to generative AI,” Glick said. 

While a possible ban over the social media platform looms, TikTok Shop has been making a push to capture Gen Z's dollars and take share away from e-commerce competitors.

The app has continued to grow in popularity, particularly with consumers. Per research conducted by TikTok, 70% of users say they discover new brands and products on the platform and 83% report TikTok playing a role in user’s purchase decisions. The company also reports that three in four users are likely to buy something while using TikTok.

Even before the shopping feature launched in the U.S. in 2023, brands were already leveraging TikTok to reach consumers, especially young people.

The platform began to introduce its own sales events, similar to those of Amazon, Walmart and Target. Its summer sales promotion Deals for you Days became a recurring event for the platform with U.S. shoppers spending an average of $52 during the sale.

Michael Maloof, head of marketing at Earnest Analytics, said in an interview that shopping on TikTok is becoming far more promotional and in competition with other big retailers' well-known seasonal sales.

“To give a good idea of the framework we're working with, with TikTok Shop almost everyone already has it,” Maloof said. “It's starting to become very promotional and matching the promotion cycles of big e-commerce retailers and that they've done a really good job of getting people from the platform to also shop.”

TikTok Shop has continued to expand its e-commerce approach by partnering with Real Authentication, launching a pre-owned luxury category in the U.K. and introducing an accelerator program for women and LGBTQIA+ owned businesses. And on Black Friday, TikTok Shop drew more than $100 million in single-day sales, tripling results from the previous year.

Although the app's future remains uncertain, brands, influencers and shoppers stand to benefit from engaging with TikTok Shop.

TikTok’s impact for brands

Legacy companies like Maybelline, Gap, Pizza Hut and Amazon have leaned into TikTok in order to capitalize on the social platform's growing influence on consumers.

E.l.f. Cosmetics was the first brand featured in TikTok Shop’s Super Brand Day sales event. For an entire day, TikTok put the cosmetics brand front and center on the shopping platform. With the announcement, the brand debuted a new product, its Power Grip Dewy Setting Spray and an original song. The cosmetics brand also held a sale on TikTok Shop for the day, where customers could earn a free Power Grip Primer mini upon spending $15. 

"E.l.f. has thrived on TikTok Shop by creatively engaging with our community and building exciting, culturally relevant moments,” Nico Le Bourgeois, head of TikTok Shop’s U.S. Operations, said in a statement.

Nike similarly has been working with TikTok. The athletics retailer released the "Future Lab" pack and tapped a popular football creator (@ben) to initiate the campaign with a branded hashtag challenge called #MagicBoots. Fans were invited to show off their best football tricks, wearing their Nike shoes for a chance to win a pair from the new drop.

In six days, Nike's TikTok profile gained 215,000 followers, according to a case study from TikTok on the campaign.

TikTok also ran a live challenge page for 60 days, in-feed ads and a brand takeover from Nike. The hashtag was able to be seen on the Discover page’s trending hashtag list. The campaign ended up with over 317 million views total and 160,000 user entries.

“When you get the creative, Creator and ad placement strategy right, you can generate huge awareness on TikTok, at a rapid pace,” TikTok said in the case study. 

What influencers stand to gain from the platform

TikTok Shop has also created new opportunities for content creators. TikTok Shop created an affiliate program for the app’s influencers. The program is a commission-based relationship between brands and the creators who promote items. The TikTok for Business affiliate program connects agencies, strategic partners and content creators with merchants.

Nearly three in five Gen Z consumers say they trust recommendations by local or micro-influencers, per a survey by Mavely. Over a quarter of U.S. consumers, majority Gen Z, who responded to the survey reported buying a gift directly based on an influencer’s recommendations. 

TikTok Shop merchants can also opt-in to allow TikTok to handle product storage, picking, packing and shipping. TikTok supports third-party payment platforms, like PayPal, for checkout.

Popcorn brand Like Air, which was founded in 2020, previously sold its products exclusively at Kroger and Albertsons. Now, the company uses TikTok Shop to sell its single serve bags in exclusive flavors and hosts monthly flavor drops.

The company recruited influencer duo @rebekahandsara to host live shopping events on TikTok for Like Air. Each week, the two go live to drop giveaways, discounts and get a feel for what customers want next from the company. This influences the flavors Like Air introduces monthly and what retailers carry the brand.

“We hired them to be full-time members of the Like Air team to really build out our TikTok,” Allison Lin, Like Air’s co-founder, said in an interview. “So we've decided that we see TikTok as the future. It's as if it's a future way to retail the product.”

Lin noted a New York Times article that recently compared TikTok Shop to QVC for the digital era because of all the live shopping events that occur on the platform.

For Like Air, Lin said TikTok Shop is the quickest route to market. Upon developing a new flavor, she said it can take about six months to a year before reaching retail shelves. With TikTok Shop, Like Air can create a new flavor and sell it in a matter of weeks.

“It's a really great way to stay engaged with our audience,” Lin said. “They come up with different ideas all the time and when we're asking what new flavor should we come out with. We're really able to turn around and say, 'We listened to what you wanted, and we're serving it up to you next month versus you having to wait a good six months, a year, even year and a half, to see it on retail shelves.’”

Gen Z favors TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop is increasingly becoming a source of inspiration for gifting, especially with younger generations.

Over half of U.S. Gen Z shoppers said they planned on checking off a majority of their holiday shopping list through TikTok Shop, according to an August report by Fiverr. Nearly 54% of Gen Z shoppers will find all of their gifts on the platform.

TikTok Shop had the largest influence (34%) on gift-finding for Gen Z compared to influencers’ recommendations (25%) and generative AI search (14%), according to Fiverr’s report. 

ICSC data also indicates that 85% of Gen Z consumers said social media is impacting their buying decisions, with almost half of respondents naming TikTok and Instagram as having the most influence over their purchases.

TikTok Shop continues to have a major hold on Gen Z’s spending power. Earnest Analytics reports that Gen Z adults from ages 18 to 24 are about three times more likely to spend on TikTok Shop compared to the average shopper. In February 2024, over 81% of TikTok Shop sales came from existing customers, up from 64% in November 2023. 

The growing popularity of TikTok Shop and the platform's ability to quickly adapt to changing trends is driving younger consumers to return, according to Maloof.

TikTok Shop is "very good at keeping people coming back and that has to be because people are already on TikTok Shop every day,” Maloof said.

TikTok Shop is winning over loyal Temu and Shein shoppers

Temu and Shein may have found competition in TikTok Shop and this season’s sales results post-holiday will show the true impact of this overlap. Among popular e-commerce platforms, Shein and Temu share the highest percentage of customers with TikTok Shop. The overlap is the highest of any fast fashion or general apparel brand, per an Earnest Analytics report released in April. 

Temu, known for its ultra-cheap prices, safety concerns and controversial use of the de minimis exemption, has grown popular among budget-conscious customers and their ability to make “haul” purchases, consisting of many items for a low price. TikTok Shop shares 25% of its customers with Temu, alongside H&M (20%), Etsy (17%), EBay (14%) and Amazon (12%). Despite U.S. consumers’ privacy concerns with Temu, its low prices have kept customers coming back. 

Another retailer facing similar legal and privacy reputation challenges, Shein has customer overlap with TikTok. Around 28% of Shein customers also purchased from TikTok Shop. TikTok’s advantage? Its ability to entertain, influence and make customers feel they're getting the lowest price, per Maloof.

“Temu is an app you open with the intent to shop,” Maloof said. “People don't necessarily open TikTok to buy, they open it for entertainment, and they stay to buy. And the time that people are spending on TikTok Shop is growing, and that's really more important because every minute you spend on the platform is another minute you're potentially going to be sold something.”

The app continues to show that customers are more likely to return to TikTok Shop than with any other platform. Per Earnest Analytics credit card data, over 27% of TikTok Shop users returned to buy in just five months after their first purchase. This retention rate leads other e-commerce platforms such as Temu (20%), Shein (10%) and Etsy (8%). 

Users are already on TikTok for pleasure so a small purchase, or a few adding up over time, is normal for an app that combines entertainment and commerce, something Temu and Shein don’t do, per Maloof.

TikTok “could stop getting downloads tomorrow and they still have plenty of room to grow TikTok Shop sales among existing customers, which is huge,” Maloof said. “Temu downloads have slowed down and so have their checkouts. ... TikTok Shop is just a completely different model, and I think that they've got a lot of runway still.”

As one of the most promising, and fear-inducing, technologies of the day, artificial intelligence was a frequent topic of conversation across panels at Shoptalk’s spring conference in Las Vegas. Much like at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in January, retailers considered the possibilities of the tech, how they go about implementing it and the ways retail remains very human.

Perhaps one of the most succinct statements about retail’s use of AI came from Mandeep Bhatia, senior vice president of global digital product and omnichannel innovation at Tapestry, who was in turn quoting someone else. 

“Humans won’t be replaced by AI. Humans with AI will replace humans without AI,” Bhatia said, a sentiment that was echoed across many panels as retailers considered how the tech could be useful and where human involvement is still very much needed.

Across the industry, retailers are turning to AI to help with customer experience initiatives and to boost loss prevention, while shoppers are turning to the technology to help them with purchases as well. Opinions are thus far mixed, but there’s no doubt that AI is one of the hottest testing grounds in retail right now.

Here’s a sampling of what companies had to say about the technology at Shoptalk Spring — and how they’re using it now.

Toys R Us

At Toys R Us, the brand jumped headfirst into AI with OpenAI’s Sora tool. According to Kim Miller, global chief marketing officer of toys at Toys R Us owner WHP Global, the retailer was the first to make a branded video through Sora. The retailer chose to make an homage to Charles Lazarus, who founded Toys R Us.

Although video storytelling with AI “has a long way to go,” Miller said it’s been improving quickly — and the effort at Toys R Us paid off.

“The video went viral,” Miller said. “A lot of people were asking, ‘Why did you do it?’ And I said, ‘The train has left the station and we wanted to be the first one on it. And we wanted to embrace it.’ We want to always be embracing new ways to tell stories and to reach people so that they are interested in not only the story you're telling, but how you're telling it as well.”

Meta

“All the small guys, startups, they're going — they're on the train first. They're experimenting. They're doing it. Where a lot of bigger brands go, ‘I'm going to wait. Maybe it won't fit my brand DNA. It's scary.’ But it is the ones who take the risk in this moment of gaining competitive advantage [that] will win,” Karin Tracy, group lead of retail and e-commerce at Meta, said. “I feel like so many have gotten over the hump of automation … the next hump is Gen AI for creative.” 

Meta already offers GenAI tools for ad creation, including background and text generation, according to Clara Shih, vice president of business AI at Meta. In one example, Shih said Living Proof saw a 13% higher click-through rate using its tools and 18% higher total purchase volume. But when it comes to creative, Tracy noted that human creativity is still a key part of that process.

“It's for the brands who figure out how to supplement the efforts of their creative team, of all the mundane stuff that's taking their time — think resizing images, writing different versions of copy, even making a still image move — these little moments that will have incremental points in performance and lead to this diversification that we know needs to happen,” Tracy said. “There's really low-risk ways you can get on the train. Doesn't have to be a full video yet, but there's ways that you can absolutely start using this and giving your creative teams time to be creative.”

Meta is also rolling out new ways for brands to use AI, including ads that customers can have a conversation with. Shih outlined a test case of this functionality with Kitsch, in which a shopper sees a video ad for a shampoo bar and has the ability to then ask the ad whether it will work for their hair type and order three different bars through the conversation. Voice agents like this also have the potential to break down silos between customer support and purchase-focused marketing chatbots, according to Shih.

“That voice agent might have a conversation with a consumer about pre-sales questions about the product — just asking if there's different allergens, how quickly can it be shipped to a certain location — but there also might be customer support questions,” Shih said. “In the past, we've deployed chatbots that were just for marketing or just for support. And so I think it's just time to make it a more cohesive customer experience and AI to lead the way and enable that going forward.”

The social media giant also just released omnichannel ads, which use AI models to connect shoppers with products that are in stores in addition to online. Shih proposed the example of a customer in Las Vegas shopping for makeup for the night, who needs to buy a product in person.

“Our local ads can now show which store nearby, across the street in the Las Vegas mall, has this particular product in stock and target us specifically because of a variety of factors that AI picks up,” Shih said. 

Overall, Shih likened the state of AI now to the early days of the internet.

“Roll up your sleeves and start trying. I think that AI is one of those technologies that you really learn best by doing,” Shih said. “Those who are able to lean in, just like those who were able to embrace e-commerce early 20 years ago, it's a moment to create sustained competitive advantage.”

Foot Locker

“I think it can be really tempting with retail tech trends to think of it as an ‘or,’ right? It’s framed as stores or digital, human-centric experiences or AI-powered experiences,” Kim Waldmann, global chief customer officer for Foot Locker, said. “It's easy to get to the ‘or,’ but really it's a false dichotomy. I think what we really believe at Foot Locker is tech enables more human powered-experiences … tech and AI can remove some of the more mundane, transactional, manual work from our store employees and free them up to do what they do best, which is be creative, storytell.”

As one example, Waldmann highlighted that the retailer is using AI to sift through customer experience data and help customer service employees resolve issues faster. That has in turn improved net promoter scores. The retailer also uses AI to create product details that are relevant for different markets — for example, translated into a different language or using different measurements — from the same product photo.

Improving search results and product recommendations on the retailer’s website is another “key focus,” according to Waldmann. But many of the applications are on the back-end. Foot Locker has invested in business reporting and intelligence functionalities that use AI, for example.

“Right now, you can make a vocal command or vocal request of the system and get, for instance, what were my gross margins and sales in Spain yesterday?” Frank Bracken, who was named president of Foot Locker in March, said. “And a report is generated automatically.”

An AI-driven workforce management system the retailer recently implemented takes into account data like sales forecasts and promotional calendars to help land the right number of employees in stores.

“The more productive we can be as an organization, the more we can flow into consumer-facing investments, whether it's brand building, whether it's storytelling or more refreshes and reimagined Foot Lockers,” Bracken said. “So it becomes a very perpetuating cycle in a great way.”

Google

“We can't say it enough that AI is a significant opportunity, not just to run better ads, but to actually run a better business,” Sean Scott, vice president and general manager of consumer shopping at Google, said. “And I really do think the brands that are the most willing to adapt and the most quickest to adapt will be the ones that get ahead.” 

For Google (and sister company YouTube), AI is behind features like Google Lens (which allows shoppers to search for items based on images), AR product viewing and local shopping. Much like Meta’s omnichannel ads, Google’s local shopping lets customers locate an item at a store nearby versus just online. As an example, Scott noted he’d used Google to locate a part he needed to fix a leaky faucet and picked it up that day at a nearby store. But it only works if brands participate.

“What that means is you have to upload not just your online inventory or not just one store’s inventory, but all of your stores’ inventory,” Scott said. “Because, again, shoppers are everywhere and if you're going to reach them wherever they're at, you need to make sure that that inventory is available for them so dads like me can fix leaky faucets.”

When it comes to features like Google Lens, Scott said the company sees about 20 billion visual searches per month and 25% of them have commercial intent. The executive also noted that AI is helping make very specific searches on Google yield more helpful results. A search for “men’s jeans for a Shoptalk keynote” brought up advice for dark washes and straight cuts, according to Scott, whereas a search for “skis for the Pacific Northwest” recommended wider skis to cope with the heavier snow in the region.

“What's really, I think, unique and amazing about all this is that we're not a retailer. We don't have any inventory. We don't ship anything,” Scott said. “And yet, over a billion times a day, people are shopping across Google.”

Tapestry

Summarizing associate feedback and generating product copy are two ways Tapestry is already using AI — and the luxury retailer is also considering how it can be used to generate code and experiences faster. But even as more uses become obvious, it’s important to start simple.

“Let's be real, right? There is fear in peoples’ mind, there is hesitation in peoples’ mind,” Bhatia said. “And how is it going to impact my life? How is it going to impact my job? And those things are very real and you need to acknowledge that — you need to have empathy with that.”

Bhatia stressed the need to train employees and bring them along on the journey across all levels of the organization.

“Have a lot of empathy with people, try different things and then create communities where it's safe to ask questions, where it's safe to learn, and that's how this change and training will happen,” Bhatia said.

Roblox is further blurring the line between digital and physical worlds with new retail capabilities that will enable creators to sell physical items through the gaming platform and for items purchased in the real world to unlock value in the digital space, according to a press release. 

Creators and brands can now add physical goods as items for purchase within existing virtual stores through a partnership with Shopify, where products previously had only been available for digital avatars. The two companies are expanding a pilot program they launched last fall to make integrated shopping more widely available.

A new Approved Merchandiser Program enables creators, brands, manufacturers and intellectual property holders to link off-platform retail or e-commerce purchases to digital items in the game. These new capabilities are available for U.S. users ages 13 and up. Early adopters include Fenty Beauty, The Weeknd and Paramount.

Roblox reports it has nearly 100 million daily users, many of whom are already habituated to virtual shopping for their in-game avatars. The next step in the platform’s commerce ambitions is two-fold: making real-world products available in the digital sphere while also more closely integrating physical shopping with digital experiences. 

The push reflects how a growing number of consumers jump back and forth between physical and digital experiences while on the hunt for goods. Fenty Beauty is among the brands already piloting the capabilities by offering a new shade of its Gloss Bomb Universal Lip Luminizer via a shoppable in-game experience. 

“We love to surprise and delight with our brand experiences and our third chapter of the Fenty Beauty Experience on Roblox does just that,” said Nanette Wong, vice president of global brand marketing at Fenty Beauty, in a statement. “We’re merging the physical and digital worlds by offering a first-of-its-kind shopping experience inside the game that brings our brand from Roblox to real life.”

Music superstar The Weeknd is using the commerce platform to sell a mixed package that includes a ticket to his film, “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” as well as a limited-edition digital item on Roblox. 

For Roblox, the road runs both ways in the digital-physical shopping convergence. Roblox’s new Approved Merchandiser Program enables creators, brands and IP holders to place a badge on items in the real world that will include a code to unlock a unique digital item, such as clothing and accessories for avatars.

For a few years now, Roblox has sought the means to connect the physical and digital through partnerships and brand activations. Companies like Vans, Walmart, E.l.f. Beauty and H&M are among the many retailers that have created virtual spaces on Roblox promoting their products through various gaming elements.

Walmart introduced a customer-facing generative AI assistant named Sparky in June to summarize and answer questions about reviews, offer recommendations and help shoppers plan purchases. Sparky, which is available in the Walmart app, will soon expand to include reordering and service booking while understanding text, image, audio and video inputs.

The release follows the March debut of its generative AI assistant for merchants, Wally, and builds on Walmart's broader plans to integrate AI into its operations and customer experience. Walmart is creating agentic AI tools tailored to retail-specific tasks and company workflows using its internal data and language learning models, the company said recently. 

Early testing from Walmart found that AI agents work best when deployed for highly specific tasks. 

Walmart is training its generative AI shopping assistant with retail-specific large language models to task agents with item comparisons, deep personalization, shopping journey completion and more. Sparky stitches together the results from those tasks to solve complex queries.

Shoppers are becoming more comfortable with AI suggestions. Recent research from Walmart found 27% of respondents prefer AI recommendations, while 24% trust social media influencers. 

Customers are using AI to compare prices, shipping times and availability, to receive alerts on price drops and to narrow down options based on historical preferences, according to the report.

Shoppers aren’t fully surrendering to AI shopping assistants just yet, data from Walmart’s Retail Rewired report found. Almost half of respondents said they were either somewhat unlikely or very unlikely to use an agent to handle an entire shopping trip.

Even as it invests in AI capabilities, Walmart recently cut 1,500 jobs in its U.S. retail and global tech teams. The cuts were done to “remove layers and complexity, speed up decision-making, and help associates innovate rapidly.”

When the checkout-free payment provider Grabango shuttered in late 2024, it dealt a second major blow to checkout-free shopping following Amazon’s decision to scale back its “Just Walk Out” experiment.

However, that progressive, lower-cost, digital approach to in-store retail payments isn’t dead. A technological boost could still help checkout-free payments succeed, say industry professionals and consultants.

“I still believe there's huge opportunity in this space,” Ken Fenyo, who was Grabango’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview in May. “Artificial intelligence will help companies put together the kind of solution that the market needs.”

Even with the rise of e-commerce, the majority of shopping still happens in-person. U.S. consumers spent $5.93 trillion in retail stores in 2024, according to research from Capital One published in May, compared to $1.34 trillion online. Retailers operate on thin profit margins and are constantly looking to trim costs and checkout-free technology offers the enticing prospect of accepting a customer’s money without paying a cashier.

Multiple companies, including San Francisco-based Zippin and Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Cantaloupe Technologies, offer checkout-free systems for retailers and venues such as stadiums. 

“At the most basic level, there’s always going to be an appetite for a checkout-free process,” said Tony DeSanctis, senior director of payments for the consulting firm Cornerstone Advisors.

A checkout-free system tracks a customer’s movements while he or she is shopping and automatically records their selections when they pull items off the shelf. The system uses cameras to track shopper activity in concert with shelf sensors that sense when items are picked up. Increasingly, the systems rely on artificial intelligence to recognize customer selections.

Checkout-free payments are most appealing in settings where a large number of customers want to make purchases quickly, said Krishna Motukuri, CEO and co-founder of Zippin, a San Francisco-based checkout-free payment company that has raised $37 million in equity investments. One such setting is a stadium or a sports arena, where the games have regular breaks that result in mass trips to the concession stand, he said.

“That creates a bit of challenge where some people never line up [because they see a long line], and that ends up being lost revenue,” Motukuri said. If customers can purchase faster, “more people are willing to shop and that revenue comes back in.”

The fan experience is top of mind for stadium operators that use checkout-free concession stands, said Adam Nuse, senior vice president for the Tennessee Titans. The Titans play in Nashville’s Nissan Stadium, which has checkout-free concessions.

“Shorter lines mean more time at your seat enjoying the game,” he said in an emailed statement.

The role of artificial intelligence

The technology tends to struggle with bulk-price items in a supermarket setting, like tomatoes or mushrooms. Grocery stores often charge for fruits and vegetables by weight rather than per item, which makes pricing produce an arduous task for a camera tracking system. But AI, which is advancing at an astonishing pace, will eventually improve that process.

Burlingame, California-based AiFi is already using artificial intelligence to help stores eliminate the checkout. AiFi’s cashierless system is in 300 stores globally, CEO Steve Carlin said in an interview, and it counts companies like Aldi, Dollar General and The Compass Group as customers.

“AI is first tracking a body,” he said. “The system then looks for what we call ‘activities of interest:’ When people shop for things, they stick a hand out into space, grab something and pull it back.”

If a customer reaches for a bottle of Coca-Cola, and then there is one less bottle of Coca-Cola on the shelf, the system will charge the customer for that soda bottle, Carlin said. He contended that AiFi’s system is more than 99% accurate and has advanced enough to be used in any store or supermarket.

Lori’s Gifts, a chain of gift shops with around 400 locations mostly in hospitals, uses AiFi’s system to keep its shops open around the clock, said Brandon Glenn, the company’s vice president of marketing.

“We can meet the growing demand for 24/7 access without the need [for customers] to wait in line, or rely on traditional staffing,” he said.

History of checkout free shopping

Checkout-free payments evolved from self-checkout kiosks.

Store owners used the kiosks to cut labor costs, said John Talbott, a professor of marketing at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business who studies retail.

“Convenience stores are labor-intensive,” he said. “And it’s difficult to find people to reliably work the shifts, because they often are open 24 hours.” Stores have trouble hiring workers for the night shift, or who are willing to stay in a position that requires overnight work, Talbott said.

An earlier version of cashierless checkout, the ubiquitous self-checkout line, has proven troublesome. Research shows self-checkout is an inviting target for shoplifters, raising questions about whether or not it is worth the savings, DeSanctis said.

Enter checkout-free shopping, which carries with it the cost savings of a self-checkout with less opportunity for theft.

The first store to offer cashierless payments was an Amazon Go store in Seattle that used the company’s “Just Walk Out” system and opened to the public in 2018, Talbott said.

Grabango — which was founded in 2016 — officially launched its first checkout-free system at a GetGo convenience store near Pittsburgh in 2020. Then, in a test of a broader market audience, grocery chain Aldi opened a checkout-free store in the Chicago suburb of Aurora using Grabango’s technology in early 2024.

Why Grabango failed and Amazon pulled back

San Francisco-based Grabango wasn’t adding locations fast enough to impress potential investors and secure a needed funding round, said Fenyo, who is now an independent consultant.

Not enough retailers were ready to widely use checkout-free systems, Fenyo, said. “They were testing it slowly, rolling it out. But it wasn't at the pace venture capitalists wanted.”

Store customers’ gradual acceptance of Grabango technology is part of what gives Fenyo the confidence that there will eventually be a strong market for checkout-free shopping.

Grabango’s research found shoppers were initially repelled by the technology, but started to prefer checkout-free payments once they use them a few times, he said.

“We had stores with Aldi, and Circle K, and I think we were seeing adoption,” Fenyo said.

When Amazon announced last year that it was removing checkout-free technology from its U.S. supermarkets, a company spokesperson told CNBC that customers liked the system, but preferred shopping for deals and checking their receipts as they browsed the store.

Amazon's system also had another major flaw, Talbott said. It made returns and customer disputes more complicated since there were fewer employees in the store.

Additionally, the company's Just Walk Out was questioned last year after a reports said the technology relied on hundreds of workers in India. Amazon responded in a blog post, stating that the reports were "erroneous" and that associates don't watch live video of shoppers to generate receipts, but that those processes were taken care of automatically by computer vision algorithms.

However, even as Amazon removed checkout-free systems from its own stores, it continued to sell the technology to third parties such as stadiums, hospitals and college campuses. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant revealed last year that it was installing a checkout-free system at St. Joseph’s/Candler hospital system in Savannah, Georgia, making it the first hospital to use the technology. A St. Joseph’s/Chandler spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Why checkout-free technology can still work

Artificial intelligence will help companies put checkout-free systems in more stores, Fenyo predicted. “I think you're going to see that over the next few years it will begin to emerge and rapidly scale up,” he said.

As AI improves, it will make checkout-free systems more accurate and efficient, and able to identify more items, expanding the number of stores that can use checkout-free technology, Fenyo said.

“It’s hard to see what retail formats would work in a way that 100% of the items would lend themselves to this technology,” Bowman said. “And product assortments always change.”

But as artificial intelligence improves, it will reach the point that a checkout-free shopping system can recognize more opaque items, Fenyo said.

“We were close [at Grabango], but not quite where we needed to be,” he said.

The costs are also coming down, Motukuri said. And as expenses continue to fall, “you’ll start to see more of these stores around the country.”

And not everyone is convinced it can work.“I've always wondered if it was a solution looking for a problem,” said Douglas Bowman, a marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School who studies consumer behavior.

Cutting costs is appealing to merchants, but consumers aren’t clamoring for the technology, he said.

“If Amazon can't do it, I don't know that anybody can,” Talbott said. That company is “extremely capable from a tech standpoint” and has “infinite amounts of money to spend.”

Major grocery chains and retailers either did not respond to a request for comment or declined to discuss their use — or avoidance — of checkout-free systems.

A spokesperson for Giant Food declined to comment while spokespeople for Walmart and Kroger did not respond to requests for comment.

As the AI race intensifies, U.S. businesses are pouring resources into the technology.

U.S. businesses have spent $403,000 on average over the past year to develop or implement AI-powered customer experience tools, according to a survey of executives at 300 large and mid-sized e-commerce companies in the U.S. and Europe conducted by content management system provider Storyblok. 

Nearly a third (30%) of respondents said using AI has only made a slight improvement in their customers’ digital experience. However, most (97%) of the respondents said their AI has delivered a good return on investment, the survey found. 

Among the common reasons why U.S. businesses adopted AI were customer service (61%), marketing analysis (60%), automating administrative tasks (42%), translation services (41%) and content creation (40%).

Almost a third (30%) of the executives surveyed said their companies had spent more than $500,000 on their AI investments. But the report also illustrates the mixed results execs see after using AI despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“The transformative potential of AI for the digital experience is enormous, but our research highlights a clear gap between expectation and reality,” Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok, said in a press release. “While U.S. businesses are seeing some improvements, these remain incremental rather than truly transformative.”

Nevertheless, major brands and retailers have been using generative AI to create content and assist with administrative tasks. In March, Walmart unveiled Wally, its generative AI tool that helps merchants enter and analyze data, identify product performance issues and answer operational questions. In April, L’Oréal Groupe announced its use of Google Imagen 3 and Gemini multimodal models to help its marketers build new concepts, create storyboards and redesign packaging. 

With more companies tapping into generative AI applications, retail execs at recent conferences have discussed both the potential and limitations of the technology. Retailers and technology companies at Shoptalk Spring discussed AI use cases ranging from localized ads to speeding along customer service work.

Although retailers have been piloting the technology in areas like supply chains and personalization, companies remain largely in the exploratory phase. For the foreseeable future, the industry will rely heavily on a human touch, Target CEO Brian Cornell said during the National Retail Federation’s Big Show conference.

For many consumers, shopping for clothes follows a familiar pattern: leaving the house with hope and optimism before facing packed parking lots, messy dressing rooms, crying children and a surfeit a product choice. Often, they return home demotivated and empty-handed.

“We all know that shopping is hard, and traditional shopping in its current form is broken,” said Debbie Woloshin, chief marketing officer at styling service Stitch Fix. “We know that 90% of consumers feel stress when they’re looking for something, and we know that it applies to their fit and style needs.”

Stitch Fix has been working to address those pain points since its founding in 2011, turning style preferences into individually selected apparel boxes. But the company has faced widening declines in recent years, with fiscal year 2024 net revenue down 16%. To turn its fortunes around, Stitch Fix last year began a transformation strategy that it hopes will help it return to overall revenue growth during fiscal year 2026.

As part of the pivot, Woloshin has helped oversee a rebrand, reimagining of the Stitch Fix client experience and the launch of a new brand platform. That platform, called Retail Therapy, brings its title to life as actual support groups and counselor sessions in both scripted and unscripted content appearing across social media, TV, over-the-top video and YouTube. The company plans to continue building on the platform, which debuted in August, after seeing early success, CEO Matt Baer said on a recent earnings call.

Woloshin was appointed chief marketing officer at Stitch Fix in May 2022 after serving in the same role at Marc Jacobs. In her first interview since joining the company, Woloshin spoke to sister publication Marketing Dive about the rebrand, artificial intelligence and staying agile amid macro challenges.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: Tell me about Retail Therapy and what informed the brand platform.

DEBBIE WOLOSHIN: Retail Therapy as a platform for the brand digs deep in terms of personalization, as well as solving for the pain points that we know our clients experience, and bringing that joy and confidence to our clients and making sure that they look and feel their best.

We look at the cast who tell their stories, and their stories are incredibly relatable, very real and [similar] to what we hear from our clients. It’s everyone from the woman who tried on 15 pairs of jeans and still isn’t even sure if the one she landed on has the right fit to the guy who only wears a Hawaiian shirt because that’s the thing that he thinks looks good on him or the woman who basically shops for her clothing where she buys her groceries. We focus on these real-world stories, and this cast of characters really highlights our ability to solve for these problems.

How do you think about content, both in the stories chosen and how to best tell them?

Everything centers on what we know our clients need from us and where we meet them, in terms of where they’re digesting content or where they have needs and opportunities. We do a lot of social listening. We have a community called In The Fix, which is a panel where we get great information. We have a treasure trove of information from our stylist and client notes, as well as from the stories that they tell. 

Through that filter, we have created this platform to not just highlight the problems, but show different ways that we can deliver the solution. What we’ve seen, in many cases, is a 17% increase in engagement, and — a stat that I’m really proud of — a 67% increase in watch time, which I think tells me two things: not only is it resonating, but from a “how it works” service and education perspective, it’s helpful.

How does Retail Therapy fit in as part of the brand’s other efforts?

The rebrand was rooted in connecting to where we were in our transformation, and our transformation had two important parts to it: building the foundation and then evolving the client experience. The brand hadn’t rebranded since its inception, so this was more than 10 years in the making. It gave us opportunity to do a couple things: refresh, make the branding more modern and then change the tone of voice to be more of a two-way relationship, to feel much more empathetic, which is important, and to make sure that we brought a little bit of levity to what can be a very stressful situation. 

That connected at the same time with improvements and upgrades to the client experience and was the perfect match, because we were speaking about personalization, we were speaking about bringing the stylist out behind the curtain. We were speaking about how we can deliver [for clients], whether you’re going through a body transformation, whether you just had a baby, whether you need to attend your sister’s wedding or if you have three kids and just don’t have time to go shopping.

All of those things came together for us to be able to tell that story, raise awareness for the brand and also really build a lot of consideration and engagement. 

Stitch Fix has been integrating AI into the business since the beginning. How is that evolving with the current fascination with AI?

From a marketing perspective, what we’re focused on is how we can use AI as an enablement tool, and a lot of that is rooted in the back-end processes that help us bring either product or content to life more quickly. We used some AI when we did the rebrand, which was super fun and a little bit different in terms of look and feel for a breakthrough perspective. We additionally have used it in some quick creation for social content.

In conjunction with the rebrand, we also innovated and created a new interface from a client-facing perspective that has an AI element to it. It’s called StyleFile, and it’s fantastic because it helps our client understand their style type and persona. Using a combination of the data they provide to us when they onboard, which is a treasure trove of information, as well as a lot of information we have about different style types combined to create this very unique persona for each person. 

Bringing those types of innovation to life for our clients through AI not only builds on our trust and our personalization with them, but it also helps to give them the tools to be able to ask questions when they’re shopping with their stylist, or when they want to give us information about what they need from us.

How do you stay agile and communicate during a period marked by turbulence, whether concerning tariffs or a potential TikTok ban?

Because we are so well-armed from a tech and data perspective, we have a lot of agility built in. From a client perspective, we understand what they need. What we’re focused on for our client is telling the story of value and giving them the tools as part of the Stitch Fix community, or as someone who would join the Stitch Fix community, to understand the convenience, the value, how we can help them with their budgets and how we can help them with versatility. 

From a content placement perspective, we’re in a lot of different places. Although we are on TikTok, and we get some great “how it works” content there through some of the creators we work with… we’re not reliant on that, and so we don’t have an issue there.

At the National Retail Federation’s Big Show at the Javits Center this year, the topic of AI was inescapable.

Nvidia’s Azita Martin, who is the company’s vice president and general manager for retail and CPG, helped set the tone, as she discussed “game-changing times for the retail industry” with Walmart U.S. chief John Furner. The next day she spoke with Lowe’s Chief Digital and Information Officer Seemantini Godbole and Randy Lack of Dell Technologies about how the home improvement retailer “leverages AI to become an agile digital retailer.”

“AI is real, and I encourage all of you to get started,” Martin told the NRF audience, after Furner noted that AI can be intimidating. “I would first of all really recommend that the AI initiatives be top-driven. In other words, you need executive sponsorship. You need to have the top executives in your company believing. The second thing I would look at is, what are some of your biggest business challenges?”

Because of the massive number of AI-related sessions, speakers and vendors at the Big Show this year, there is no way to capture all that was said on this vast topic, but here are four themes that emerged.

AI could revolutionize supply chains

Retail supply chain executives were late to the party, but have recently embraced the potential of AI to streamline and improve several processes, from forecasting and procurement to fulfillment.

The pandemic roiled supply chains, which led to inventory woes that some retailers are still grappling with. That has revealed the need for updated technologies. Nvidia itself recently unveiled Mega, a new AI product that employs a digital twin to develop, test and optimize systems before they’re actually deployed at facilities, while Lowe’s has employed digital twins at 1,700 of its stores that provide daily operational and inventory updates.

“Supply chain, more than anywhere in retail in my opinion, is going to benefit the most from AI,” Martin told Furner. 

AI pumps up personalization, but privacy remains a concern

E-commerce players have long boasted that they have access to customer data that stores can’t collect, and AI is set to deploy that in fresh ways, several speakers noted during the conference.

This means a new era of digital shopping assistants and other methods of communication. Tapestry, which runs Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, is piloting AI-generated imagery that the company’s Vice President of Omni, Trang To, said “has the potential to unlock hyper-personalization at scale.”

“Cross-domain information feeding our AI models, to be able to deliver more insightful outputs on what the customer wants to see next, is critical,” she said. “And the second piece, historically, that has been the biggest hurdle for us in personalization is the speed at which we could create creative content to address all of these individuals versus segments. And that's something that I'm really excited about.”

But privacy remains a concern for many consumers, making it a concern for retailers as well.

“A decade ago [there was] a tug of war between privacy and personalization, and the tug of war is still going on,” Macy’s, Inc. CEO Tony Spring said during another session. “The reality is, we own the responsibility with the relationship ... We have to be better caretakers of information. We have to be smarter with the information we already have, and earn your trust over time with what we do with it.”

The use-case isn’t always clear

It was difficult to find a retailer at the Big Show that wasn’t at least piloting some AI-driven technology, in some capacity, for some area of its business. But many, if not the majority, seem to be in test mode.

“It's always going to be a learning experience, right?” Karen Etzkorn, chief information officer at Qurate Retail Group, said. “I think we find with Gen AI, every use-case we try, some of them have gotten significant value. Others we put to the side.”

At H&M, 2024 was a year of exploring AI, in the spirit of what Chief Digital Information Officer Ellen Svanström called an entreprenuerial mindset that is part of company culture.

“The interest and the exploration from our colleagues has been big in this area,” Svanström said. “However, we've yet to see a very real ... use-case that we can truly see specific and good value from, but we see enormous potential. In parallel, we have invested in and focused on and been very disciplined to build out our new data platform to ensure that we can truly scale in a secure way going forward. So, going forward, being open to what the real use-cases will be, to deliver value, we are ready to really focus and nail down on that. So I think in 2025, focus will be key for us.”

At least for now, there is no retail without humans

AI may have dominated the Big Show, but the 40,000 humans who attended it represent the billions of customers and employees who dominate the world of retail.

At American Eagle, Chief Marketing Officer Craig Brommers said the apparel retailer is approaching the use of AI with caution, in an effort to avoid the kind of high-profile AI-fueled blunders made by a few brands last year and preserve the authenticity and diversity its customers value.

In fact, AI is emerging as a tool to assist humans, rather than take over from them.

“Even in an environment where we know technology is going to play a bigger and bigger role in retail, listening to consumers and human interaction still matters,” Target CEO Brian Cornell told an NRF audience. “I think it's that balance between technology and that human interaction in retail that's going to pave the way for the future. So I think you’d better spend some time making sure you build trust, have those honest conversations, explain the ‘why.’ In a changing environment, we know it's going to be the combination, it's not an either-or. It's going to be that combination of technology that's going to fuel growth, and human interaction in retail, I believe, is going to play a role for years to come.”