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At the NRF Big Show earlier this week, it was a rare occurrence when AI didn’t come up at least once during a panel or speech, not to mention the countless booths on the exhibition floor touting the AI-powered capabilities of their services or products. Yet while much of this talk was predictably optimistic about the potential of AI, there were notes of caution buried under the hype.
Keith Mercier, vice president of WW retail and consumer goods industry at Microsoft, said during one discussion that he’s seen a lot of customers have struggled to scale their AI projects and applications.
“Last year, a lot of CEOs were asking their leaders, ‘What are we doing about AI?’ And a lot of pilots kicked off around different technologies, and we’ve seen a lot of our customers get stuck in this pilot purgatory,” he said.
The trick to avoiding this trap, he added, is making sure AI rollouts have clear business goals grounded in existing strategies rather than existing for their own sake: “Where are you going to get the biggest cost savings first? Where are you going to see the revenue growth and start to align those use cases and roll them out according to scale?”
Sam’s Club appears to have internalized this idea of focusing on outcomes when it comes to new tech. In a separate session, Todd Garner, chief product officer at Sam’s Club, said “technology needs to be pointed at the right thing.”
“I think before we have the conversation about technology, talking about how you’re solving and what you’re solving is even more important,” he added.
- Some executives were more unequivocal about the limits of AI. PacSun CEO Brieane Olson said the apparel company planned to keep AI out of product design to avoid a “sea of sameness.”
Kristin Howell, global vice president of the retail industry business unit at software provider SAP, told Retail Brew that retailers should be able to state in simple terms how an AI agent is creating business value.
“Sometimes the algorithms can be complex,” she said. “You can put a lot of sophisticated language to it, but at the end of the day, the key for retailers is being able to really boil down [to] ‘What are we trying to do with the agent?’”