Yael Kochman
January 20, 2026
NRF this didn’t just feel like a show about the future of retail tech in 2026. It felt like a show about decisions retailers must make now.
With 40,000+ attendees from around the world and representation from every major commerce, payments, and AI platform, the message was consistent: retail isn’t broken, but the assumptions behind it are. Growth is no longer driven by scale alone, and technology no longer wins by being loud. What emerged instead were a set of clear, interconnected insights shaping the next chapter of retail.
That urgency was set early at the AiR Summit (AI in Retail) emphasizing that Agentic AI refers to systems that can move beyond assistance into action. According to a new NVIDIA survey released just days before NRF:
In other words, nearly half the industry is already transitioning from experimentation to execution. If you need help deducing any of these insights on retail tech in 2026 or applying them to your business, we are happy to help. Let’s chat!
Few sessions captured this shift more clearly than actor and businessman Ryan Reynolds’ keynote. Across Aviation Gin, Mint Mobile, Wrexham A.F.C., and Maximum Effort, Reynolds outlined a playbook that runs counter to traditional retail and brand-building logic, that constraints fuel creativity, and authenticity scales faster than media spend.
Rather than building for broad demographics, Reynolds emphasized focusing on what emotionally excites a specific audience, then letting culture, not campaigns, do the distribution. His brands don’t rely on layers of executive approval or bloated production timelines, but they move quickly, talk directly to their communities, and optimize for relevance over polish.
The takeaway was especially resonant in a retail environment where media and marketing technology spending is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2030, yet attention remains harder to earn than ever. Reynolds’ approach reinforced that in an era of infinite content and AI generated everything, humor, humanity, and taste are differentiators, not add-ons. Customers don’t just buy products anymore, they opt into worlds, values, and inside jokes.
The lesson for retailers is that connection, creativity, and culture now drive growth more than budget size.
Community emerged as one of the most consistent growth engines across the board, spanning DTC, retail media, and physical stores. Speakers like John Douglas (Gymshark) highlighted how apps and owned channels now function less as sales tools and more as community infrastructure, supporting loyalty, identity, and repeat behavior. He added that while brands remain almost 90% DTC, physical retail is expanding, not for reach, but for connection.
Alexandra Tsingeni (Retail O-Tones) captured the shift too: “Community has become the growth engine of modern retail, replacing transactions with relationships and insight with action. The next generation of retail software won’t be visible to customers, but it will be decisive for brands. Key word: Digital Nervous System.”
The truth is in the numbers about retail tech in 2026, as per the CI&T Retail Tech Reality Check with Melissa Minko of CI&T:
What’s changed is the scope, as AI is no longer confined to pilots or innovation labs, but it is actively reshaping merchandising, pricing, supply chain, planning, labor, and decision-making structures. As Christine Russo (What Just Happened, Rethink Retail Expert 2026) put it: “The conversation around AI clearly shifted from curiosity to urgency. The most compelling sessions and discussions, from my perspective, will be the impact of AI on organizational structure and decision-making as AI works across merchandising, operations, planning, pricing, supply chain and the customer journey. We may see a fundamental restructure.”
Similarly, Chris Edwards (Circle K) summarized at the AI Stage, “Think of AI this way: what would you do if you had 10,000 people, and then find a way to do it with AI”. In other words, it’s a force multiplier.
This shift was echoed at the AiR Summit, where we learned that AI agents are no longer augmenting teams, they are beginning to execute work at scale. That evolution explains why adoption is accelerating as per NVIDIA, where 90% of retailers report revenue impact and 95% report cost reduction.
The implication is profound, that AI isn’t a tool retailers use, it’s becoming the system retailers run on. The conversation is no longer “should we deploy AI?” but “how fast can we reorganize around it?”
Retailers widely agreed that agent led purchasing will arrive first through automatic replenishment and low consideration items. The consumer “wow” moment is still ahead. Where AI is already delivering value is operational like with inventory optimization, logistics, routing, returns, and financial management. This is where alignment matters most as the backend fuels the experience in the front end, which we discussed in our AI trends forecast of BFCM. While much of the impact is happening behind the scenes, consumer behavior is already catching up. Citing a recent Bain survey:
Multiple speakers at the AiR Summit (by Rethink Retail) focused not on futuristic concepts, but on agentic systems already deployed inside stores, from computer vision and checkout optimization to task orchestration for frontline teams. The prominence of roles spanning digital, data, product, and store operations (Pandora, PacSun, KWI) signals an important shift: in store AI is no longer experimental or siloed within innovation teams. It is now a core operational lever tied directly to efficiency, execution consistency, and customer experience.
Kimberly Morgan (The Fashion Tech Exec, Retail Women in Tech) emphasized: “The future of agentic commerce isn’t about choosing cloud or edge – it’s about aligning compute power, data placement, and intelligence to the moment of execution, with an ROI-first, outcome-driven mindset that ensures ambition translates into measurable impact.”
In conclusion, this prime trend in retail tech in 2026 shows that retail differentiation increasingly happens in execution, not experience design alone.
While AI is everywhere, its visibility matters less. Luxury and experience driven brands emphasized that technology should disappear into the experience, not dominate it. This is why the statistic that 75% of consumers interact with AI daily, often unknowingly, is especially noteworthy in a luxury context.
Chris Igwe (Chris Igwe International) reflected on this balance: “Tech needs to be quiet, seamless in engaging with the customer, especially the luxury consumer. So, whether it is AI specifically, or technology in general, it must not take centre stage. The consumer expects it to be there anyway.” He was referencing LVMH as a prime example.
Similarly, David Polinchock (Unified Brand Experience Lab) pointed to Morgan’s concept store: “They turned the entire store into a digital experience. Zero product on the shelves and all of the fulfillment behind the scenes. They have work to do, but it was one of the most engaging experiments on creating a different retail experience I saw at the show.”
The lesson for retail tech in 2026 is that innovation doesn’t need a loud spectacle, but it needs intention that makes the customer experience seamless and better, almost making it more human again, something we discussed previously.
This was also a key takeaway from the AiR Summit of how AI agents are being positioned as a functional workforce, not just tools, supporting customer service, merchandising decisions, supply chain coordination, backend engineering and orchestration. The presence of both retail operators (Tapestry, Manor AG) and infrastructure leaders (Vercel, Gradial) underscores that agentic systems are no longer theoretical, but they are being embedded across the retail stack, often invisibly to consumers.
This aligns directly with the overall takeaway that impactful technology is increasingly quiet, seamless, and infrastructure level.
One of the clearest trends for retail tech in 2026 was the rise of Vision AI as an active participant in store operations, not just an analytics layer. From loss prevention to transaction validation, retailers are adopting AI that works in real time, at the edge, and without introducing shopper friction. This is a critical shift as omnichannel complexity continues to pressure margins.
Dan Revah (Shopic) explained the impact: “Vision AI is a proactive store agent, not a passive observation layer. Retailers can definitely rely on computer vision tech to operate in real time to validate transactions and prevent loss immediately, delivering the scale and reliability required to protect margins without introducing shopper friction.”
This aligns with a broader theme that brand trust begins with operations. Speed, availability, and reliability are now as important as brand storytelling.
As discovery becomes conversational and AI driven, product catalogs have become strategic assets. Retailers and brands are drilling down to SKU and item level data, ensuring their catalogs are visible, structured, and accessible to large language models. Sessions featuring Microsoft, Oracle, and Shopify reinforced a consistent message: garbage in still equals garbage out.
Search remains surprisingly basic, dominated by simple queries like “black jeans, 32 waist”, even as consumers grow more sophisticated. AI driven discovery will only work if the underlying data is accurate, complete, and connected across systems. Despite widespread AI adoption, the fact that search behavior remains surprisingly basic reveals a gap between consumer intent and technical execution. Closing that gap will define winners in AI enabled commerce, which depend as much on data quality as on marketing spend.
Despite all the innovation on display, there were several reminders that technology doesn’t lead, but people do. Recurring leadership lessons included:
As multiple executives emphasized, AI can accelerate decisions, but leadership still sets direction. The inclusion of fireside chats at the AiR Summit with senior leaders from Intel and Manhattan Associates, moderated by Kimberly Morgan (The Fashion Tech Exec, Retail Women in Tech), underscored that the hardest challenges ahead are no longer technical, they are organizational, like who owns AI decisions, and how do humans and agents collaborate?
The AiR summit also highlighted that the real constraint ahead is no longer technical, but organizational. As AI agents begin executing work autonomously, questions of ownership, accountability, and governance become unavoidable. Of the 20 speakers on stage, 7 were identified as top AI leaders, alongside global retail executives and operators actively deploying or planning agentic systems today. The emphasis was not on demos or pilots, but on execution: AI agents managing merchandising decisions, orchestrating supply chains, supporting customer service, and coordinating backend engineering. The message and implication for retail tech in 2026 was clear: AI is no longer an enhancement to the workforce, it is becoming part of the workforce.
This reinforces one of the most consistent themes, that leadership still matters more than technology, and the retailers that win will be those that pair intelligent systems with clear decision making frameworks. Technology can accelerate decisions, but leadership still determines direction, boundaries, and trust.
NRF 2026 showed an industry growing up, almost maturing with AI. Overall the key takeaways for retail tech in 2026 are:
With more than 21% of retail and CPG companies already deploying or planning AI agents within the next year, that infrastructure shift is no longer theoretical. Or, as Ryan Reynolds’ session subtly reminded us, the brands that endure aren’t the loudest, they’re the most human. Clearly, retail’s future isn’t built by moving first, it’s built by building right.
Many of these themes also came to life most clearly in the Startup Hub and emerging tech showcases, where companies focused on integrated solutions from catalog intelligence and computer vision to supply chain optimization, payments, and in-store automation. Here is a curated list of Israeli retail tech companies translating these ideas into applications across data, commerce enablement, store operations, security, supply chain, and digital experience, which we covered before:
If you need help in implementing any of these insights or trends into your business, we are happy to help. Let’s chat!
