Introduction

Coresight Research is a research partner of Shoptalk Fall 2025, which took place during September 17–19 in Chicago, Illinois. Shoptalk Fall is an annual conference that unites executives from retailers, consumer brands and technology vendors to discuss emerging themes, innovations and the future of commerce. It serves as a complementary, second-half-of-the-year counterpart to Shoptalk Spring—offering industry leaders another strategic touchpoint to connect, collaborate and act on fast-moving trends.

In this report, we present highlights from the third and final day of the conference, categorized into four major themes, which we presented in our guide to the event and that align with Coresight Research’s predictions for retail in 2025 and beyond:

• Data-Driven and AI-Augmented Retail Intelligence
• Product Curation and Innovation Under Pressure
• Brand Identity, Loyalty and Customer Experience in a Shifting World
• Leading Through Volatility and Change

Shoptalk Fall 2025 Day Three: Coresight Research Insights

1. Data-Driven and AI-Augmented Retail Intelligence

Personalization as the New Loyalty Strategy

Retailers and brands must move beyond static segmentation toward real-time personalization powered by AI. Success depends as much on culture and organizational enablers as on technology. Personalization is most powerful when it fosters authentic connection, community and customer self-expression—using data to create memorable, emotional experiences for shoppers.

Dave Mathews, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Taco Bell, explained how the company reframed “personalization” around value creation and people. Matthews gave the example of loyalty integration at the drive-thru, where team members can greet customers by name, acknowledge their tier status or even celebrate birthdays. He said this turns a routine interaction into a moment of connection. Taco Bell also empowers customers to design and share their favorite menu creations, which reinforces a sense of community and shared culture around the brand. He emphasized “speed to value,” where Taco Bell tests small use cases quickly to build momentum and shift organizational culture.

Ann Piper, Head of North America, Ads, Spotify, described how personalization is at the core of Spotify’s identity. With 90% of users engaging daily, personalization is central to habit formation. Features like Spotify Wrapped have become cultural touchpoints that turn data into shareable moments of pride and identity.

Piper emphasized that personalization extends to Spotify’s advertising business. By tailoring ads to moods and moments, Spotify has boosted engagement by 38% and increased return on ad spend (ROAS) by 45%. She said this level of contextual relevance makes advertising feel natural rather than intrusive. Spotify also ensures personalization travels across devices and contexts—whether users are in the car, at home or on mobile, the experience adapts seamlessly to the moment.

Both speakers underscored that the real enablers of personalization go beyond technology. They highlighted four common factors:

• First-party data strength: Robust first-party datasets, enhanced with third-party inputs, create the foundation for accuracy and scale.
• AI and reinforcement learning: These allow brands to move from static segmentation to millions of real-time, tailored interactions.
• Cross-functional alignment: Marketing, digital and technology teams must work as one, rather than in silos.
• Culture and change management: Personalization only takes root when organizations redefine it in brand-specific terms, and cultural resonance is what makes personalization authentic.

Dane Mathews, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Taco Bell
Source: Shoptalk Fall

 

AI as Infrastructure, Not Add-On

AI is becoming the hidden infrastructure of retail. It is turning stores into sensory networks where all signals—camera, RFID and app telemetry—are processed in real time to enhance both customer experiences and operational efficiency. AI is no longer a bolt-on but the backbone of retail systems.

Todd Garner, SVP & Chief Product Officer, Sam’s Club, described the company as “member-led and tech-powered,” with the ambition of building an end-to-end experience. He highlighted the Scan & Go service, which achieved a Net Promoter Score of 90 and nearly 40% adoption, but acknowledged that it shifted friction to the store exit. The new solution, built in-house, uses computer vision arches that scan carts against receipts in less than three seconds and enable faster checkout, solving this pain point.

Garner added that more than 1,000 frontline workers now use enterprise ChatGPT to gain real-time insights. For example, associates can take a photo of an aisle and ask whether there is an issue to address.

Sanjay Radhakrishnan, SVP & Chief Technology Officer, Sam’s Club, explained that Sam’s Club outfits floor scrubbers with cameras and RFID readers. These collect 24 million images and 180 million RFID reads daily, generating inventory intelligence for associates. AI translates this into tasks like restocking or correcting signage, eliminating an estimated 200 million repetitive tasks each year. Radhakrishnan also said the company is now building “super agents” for members, partners, associates and developers. These LLM-based agents will provide speed to value while ensuring accuracy.

Left to right: Sanjay Radhakrishnan, SVP & Chief Technology Officer, Sam’s Club; Todd Garner, SVP & Chief Product Officer, Sam’s Club; and R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst & Founder, Constellation Research, Inc. (Interviewer)
Source: Shoptalk Fall

 

2. Product Curation and Innovation Under Pressure

Retail Media’s Expanding Horizons

Retail media is not only the fastest-growing ad channel but also one of the most versatile and primed to benefit from the advancement and adoption of AI. For brands, the digital endcap represents underutilized real estate with outsized sales impact, while performance TV and experiential activations offer incremental lift. The opportunity lies in using AI to bridge inspiration and conversion, delivering more personalized and native experiences that enhance—not interrupt—the customer journey.

Andrew Lipsman, Founder & Chief Analyst, Media, Ads + Commerce, highlighted the extraordinary growth trajectory of retail media compared with other digital channels. Search took 19 years to reach $1 billion in revenue, while retail media accomplished that milestone in just eight years. Social took 13 years by comparison. Today, retail media already represents 18% of advertising spend, reflecting how integral it has become to marketing strategies.

Lipsman emphasized that the digital shelf is both dynamic and cross-channel, influencing every phase of the path to purchase. Onsite advertising remains dominant, with sponsored products accounting for 80% of activity and delivering the highest ROAS compared with sponsored brands and videos. Performance TV, meanwhile, is gaining momentum due to connected TV’s ability to target narrow audiences and improve measurability. Although cost per mille (CPMs) are high and investment returns can look modest in the short term, Lipsman explained that incrementality is highest in TV, making it an undervalued channel today.

The physical store was framed as the next major frontier. Currently representing just 0.1% of ad spend, in-store retail media has enormous untapped potential. With in-store audiences twice the size of digital audiences, retailers such as CVS, Best Buy and Hy-Vee are already investing in digital signage and endcaps. “Whether a static or digital endcap, it drives significant sales,” Lipsman said, describing the digital endcap as one of the most valuable but undervalued pieces of retail real estate. Experiential activations in-store also emerged as a powerful tool for driving incremental sales and lifetime value.

Jennifer Andre, Global VP, Business Development, Expedia Group Advertising, offered a perspective from a travel industry lens. She explained that while endemic partners know Expedia’s media network well, the “big opportunity” lies in reaching agencies and non-endemic buyers. The company is focused on meeting travelers wherever they are—whether on social platforms or hotel websites—and creating seamless bridges from inspiration to booking. A recent innovation, Trip Matching, uses Instagram Reels combined with AI to generate personalized itineraries, illustrating how retail media can merge storytelling with conversion.

Andre also spoke about Expedia’s approach to onsite advertising, where the company has moved away from disruptive banners toward more native, integrated experiences. “Shoppers don’t realize they are engaging with the ads,” she said, describing advertising as additive when executed well.

Looking ahead, Andre expressed excitement about AI’s potential to disrupt commerce media and customer experience. “From planning to discovery, AI-curated itineraries and AI-powered advertising represent a massive opportunity. We are working and investing heavily in our AI approach at Expedia.”

Unified Commerce: Breaking Down the Walls

Unified commerce is about connecting not just transactions, but the entire journey before, during and after the sale. It requires breaking down silos of data and operations so that the online and physical worlds inform each other seamlessly.

Spencer Hewett, Founder & CEO, Radar, said the “missing ingredient in omnichannel has been the ability to measure the physical store.” He explained that while distribution centers offer high accuracy, most retailers still lack clear visibility into what customers are picking up, trying on or putting down in stores. Hewett said American Eagle now conducts 24 billion RFID counts per day across its stores, giving real-time instrumentation comparable to e-commerce. He emphasized that stockouts should no longer happen in 2025: “If you can find the product for the customer, you can sell more product.”

Hewett gave an example of linking marketing to in-store behavior, pointing to a Sidney Sweeney campaign that led to a major spike in store traffic over a weekend. With real-time measurement, the company was able to quickly see conversion rates and tie campaign performance directly to sales. He also predicted that agentic AI and AR glasses will make the world itself a shopping environment, with recommendations surfacing automatically as customers interact with products.

Simon Molnar, Founder & CEO, Flagship, noted that most retailers still treat omnichannel as a transactional bridge, but true unified commerce must connect online and offline experiences before the sale. He said retailers should be able to anticipate and shape customer experiences across channels, not just reconcile them after the fact. Molnar added that personalization in physical stores is increasingly more sophisticated than online, with retailers now able to optimize stores based on customer profiles within a 20-minute travel radius.

Molnar also highlighted the risks of a “one-size-fits-all” approach. He said retailers often fail to recognize the uniqueness of each store and should empower local teams to drive incremental revenue with localized data. He predicted that in the future, something a shopper sees on TikTok could immediately appear in their local store, reflecting the convergence of digital and physical environments.

Akash Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, GreyOrange, focused on the back-end challenge of balancing fulfillment between warehouses and stores. He noted that many retailers now aim for a 50/50 split, which increases complexity in stores and distribution centers alike. Automation becomes essential in managing this scale and achieving a future goal of 60/40.

Gupta also pointed out the importance of hyper-localization, noting that window displays in flagship stores in areas like SoHo and Fifth Avenue have different impacts on e-commerce demand in their regions. With real-time data, retailers can tailor assortments and displays to neighborhood-level differences. Looking ahead, he predicted that Meta’s AR glasses and AI-first systems would transform customer interactions, creating new forms of engagement both in-store and online.

Kait Stephens, Founder & CEO, Brij, emphasized that brands must break down data silos across channels to build stronger customer relationships. She said that many retailers treat wholesale and direct channels as competitors, but “one does not steal from the other.” Instead, brands that share data with wholesale partners often perform better overall.

Stephens added that consumers will provide valuable data if they receive value in return, through tools like registrations, rebates and post-purchase engagement. She described her company’s Model Context Protocol model, which connects LLMs directly to software systems. This allows teams to query campaigns in plain language—for example, “What did this campaign do today?”—and get instant insights.

The panel agreed that agentic AI will play a major role in shaping unified commerce. Hewett said that access to real-time data will allow AI systems to instantly connect shoppers to products, wherever they are in the world. Molnar admitted that retailers have not done a good job of linking online and offline to date, but predicted rapid improvement. Stephens said first-party data will become increasingly critical as agentic workflows take over routine shopping tasks, like grocery.

3. Brand Identity, Loyalty and Customer Experience in a Shifting World

Fast Innovation and Cultural Agility

Brands win not by having the best single idea, but by building cultures that constantly generate, test and launch ideas at speed.

Jenna Bromberg, Chief Marketing Officer, Papa John’s, described a challenger mindset of always outpacing and outclassing competitors. She said a Teams chat including both executives and entry-level staff generates constant trend spotting, leading to rapid activations. Examples included giving free pizza to anyone named Travis or Taylor during a celebrity moment and launching “Papa Dippa” across 3,000 restaurants in under six months.

Kaitlyn Hebert, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Ninja, SharkNinja, explained their “chase the sun” model of round-the-clock innovation across global teams. She described how prototypes are placed in thousands of homes for testing and how social media insights fuel product development. She cited the Ninja Creami ice cream maker, which grew out of consumer hacks and personalization, leading to multiple product versions.

Jeremy Lowenstein, Chief Marketing Officer, Milani Cosmetics, spoke about longer cycles in beauty, often 12–18 months, but said cultural insights guide launches. He pointed to ’90s nostalgia as inspiration for America’s Next Top Primer campaign (launched in March 2025). All three CMOs stressed the need for cultures where experimentation is encouraged, failure is accepted and speed is prioritized.

Kaitlyn Hebert, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Ninja, SharkNinja (Left); and Jeremy Lowenstein, Chief Marketing Officer, Milani Cosmetics (Right)
Source: Shoptalk Fall

 

4. Leading Through Volatility and Change

Innovation Driven by Constraints

Retail’s big themes—AI, tariffs, supply chain, customer loyalty and a changing media landscape—are converging to reshape strategies. Disruption is both pressure and opportunity: tariffs create permission to innovate, AI is maturing from hype to board-level action, Gen Z is redefining the role of stores, and loyalty and media are undergoing fundamental reinvention. Constraints and complexity are forcing retailers to act faster, rethink what creates value and make bold bets on AI and new customer engagement models.

Deborah Weinswig, CEO & Founder, Coresight Research, explained that tariffs, which cut into margins at companies such as Gap and Lululemon, have paradoxically given leaders “permission to try something totally new.” She said boards are now urging teams to move faster, supported by tools like AI to quickly disseminate critical information. She noted that some companies have even appointed Chief Tariff Officers to navigate these shifts.

Weinswig highlighted the rise of private label as a structural response to margin pressure, noting that in some cases it has grown from 10% to 30% of mix, giving retailers flexibility and higher margins. On AI, she saw marketing and inventory as the two most immediate opportunities: marketing pilots can deliver results in as little as 3–4 months, while inventory applications like sizing, allocation and forecasting can reduce waste and even extend back into materials sourcing. She predicted board-level pressure will mount in 2025 and 2026 for Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers to act.

Weinswig also drew on China’s livestreaming boom—$798 billion compared with $35 billion in the US—as a model for how creators and influencers are reshaping commerce. She said livestreaming is inexpensive, flexible and allows brands to experiment with bundling, discounts and formats in real time. US brands operating in China already livestream up to 10 hours a day, and she expects adoption to rise in the US.

Deborah Weinswig, CEO & Founder, Coresight Research
Source: Shoptalk Fall

 

Joe Laszlo, Global Head of Insights, Shoptalk, noted that the industry’s conversations in 2025 revolve around two dominant topics: AI and tariffs. Laszlo recalled a question from Gap’s CEO at Shoptalk Spring: the company thought its supply chain was not heavily China-dependent, but “Liberation Day” changed that outlook. He said this moment opened the door to more innovative approaches.

Holden Bale, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Merkle, tied tariffs back to consumer economics, saying they magnify wealth divergence and create pressure on basics and commodities while travel and hospitality remain sticky. He observed that too many companies are still working with “10-year-old insights,” which leaves them ill-prepared for rapid change.

Laszlo observed that constraints often unlock creativity. He said the physical store, once considered “old-fashioned,” is returning to relevance, with malls becoming newly important. Bale supported this, citing Merkle research showing that 81% of Gen Z prefer in-store shopping, higher than any other generation. He called the physical–digital divide a “false dichotomy” and described stores as a force multiplier.

Bale said brands must avoid the mistake of recommending products customers have returned, which damages trust. He noted that when every brand offers a points program, the differentiation disappears. Weinswig added that high-net-worth consumers are increasingly focused on convenience rather than points, while Laszlo said definitions of value vary widely among consumers.

Ben Miller, VP, Original Content & Strategy, Shoptalk, framed today’s retail environment as part of the broader attention economy. Miller emphasized the growing role of creators and influencers, noting that as Google surfaces more results through Gemini, influencer content will increasingly drive discovery. He said retailers need to plan for a world where earned media matters as much as paid.

The panel agreed that AI is not new—it has long powered demand forecasting and machine learning models—but GenAI now addresses bottlenecks in content creation. Bale reminded the audience with a John Wooden quote: “Never mistake activity for achievement,” warning that many retailers are chasing AI without focusing on its business impact.

Left to right: Deborah Weinswig, CEO & Founder, Coresight Research; Joe Laszlo, Global Head of Insights, Shoptalk; Holden Bale, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Merkle; and Ben Miller, VP, Original Content & Strategy, Shoptalk (Interviewer)
Source: Shoptalk Fall