The most overused word at CES 2025 was AI. AI was in seemingly every product—from AI backpacks to AI barbecue grills—on the CES shop floor, whether it needed to be or not.
For retailers, CES was all about decoding emerging technologies, and getting a glimpse into the future. Retail executives at CES echoed the whimsical sentiment of almost living in the future. While big names, including Walmart, were missing in action, Pinterest hosted a keynote on visual search with CTO Matt Madrigal, and Amazon launched a new ad product for retailers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Advertising launched Curate for Commerce, a product leveraging first-party retail data to offer brands scalable access to retailer supply and data off-site, with Kohl’s as an early partner. Microsoft also introduced Sponsored Promotions by Brands, which allows brands to reach shoppers across Microsoft’s retail environments like Bing Shopping on a cost-per-sale basis.
Here are some of Retail Brew’s key takeaways from the tech show.
Personalization: It was hard not to be hit by the word personalization at CES retail panels. On a panel discussion about retail technology and transformation, Chelsea Freitas, SVP of strategy and innovation at IPG Mediabrands, talked about why consumers expect more personalization.
“Their expectation is for options and variety. We’re only going to see that continue and incrementally evolve as technology makes it more accessible than ever before,” Freitas said.
Samsung’s Vice President and CMO Allison Stransky said the evolution of personalization is going to be enabled by AI: “We are at a step-changing moment where it is getting so much more effective, and that predictive ability is what is going to enable automated solutions.”
Frictionless shopping: We all know shoppers bounce if they get stuck at any point in the purchase cycle. But retailers are hopeful technology will alleviate this particular pain point.
“I think that technology is going to help take friction out of the shopping experience and truly create a more interconnected, personalized experience for customers as they’re thinking about what are their next products,” Molly Battin, SVP and CMO at Home Depot, told Retail Brew on the sidelines of CES.
On a panel about marketing, Battin also said 2025 will be the year of scale for the intersection of content and commerce, all fueled by (what else?) AI. “The data that we have, driven by personalization, and we’ve been playing in this space, I think 2025 is a year that we’re going to see it completely scale,” she said.
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Generative AI: While the AI boom may have started roughly two years ago, retail executives predicted that in 2025, it will fundamentally change the consumer shopping journey.
“AI is going to continue to transform how consumers discover, select, and ultimately finish transactions this year,” Egan Brinkman, managing director for commerce at Google who was on a panel called “Putting AI to work in retail,” told Retail Brew. “Last year, we saw LLMs [language learning models] find their emergence with Gemini and ChatGPT…But this year, it is going to be the year that AI truly transforms the consumer journey and how they discover, how they research, how they choose to buy.”
Google has made changes to make its Lens feature more shopping friendly by merging Google’s AI assistant Gemini and Google’s shopping graph database, which carries more than 45 billion product listings.
Justin Honaman, head of worldwide retail and consumer goods industry strategy and business development at Amazon, agreed. “AI is significant and will transform most customer experiences,” he said. “I encourage business people…make sure they’re investigating, understanding…It’s not just an IT thing. It’s not just a business thing. It’s a capability that’s powerful and significant.”
User first: However, some retail executives were more circumspect about technology and whether it can be put above the customer.
Retailers should make that user experience is seamless, Harvey Ma, VP and general manager of Sam’s Club Member Access Platform (MAP), part of Walmart’s Global Advertising business, said: “Stop focusing so much on technology [and] AI. Focus more about what customers want. And if we can do that, then let the technology work through those solutions.”
“I think we put some things in the wrong order so customer experience, user experience would be my plea and my takeaway for this group,” he added.