A Recap of 2026 Total Retail Tech

Total Retail Tech took place Sept. 14-16 in Dallas. The event brought select retail executives who oversee technology and marketing strategy together to learn from industry experts and each other in a small group setting. Total Retail Tech featured compelling content from industry thought leaders, peer-to-peer exchanges, one-to-one meetings, and more, providing attendees a unique and valuable learning experience. Here's a recap of the key takeaways and highlights from the main stage sessions at Total Retail Tech.

Monday, Sept. 14

• Prashant Kumar, founder and CEO of TechBlocks, the diamond sponsor of Total Retail Tech, kicked off the content program. He argued that retailers’ challenge with AI is no longer access to tools; it's converting widespread AI adoption into measurable business and customer outcomes. Kumar contrasted legacy, batch-oriented technology environments with real-time, agent-driven architectures and said retailers need to rethink the operating model behind software delivery rather than simply add more AI tools. His central message was that individual productivity gains do not automatically translate into faster launches, better customer experiences, or ROI unless the entire delivery system is orchestrated, governed, and measured around outcomes. "The future is not another AI tool, another packaged software, another agentic AI platform," Kumar noted. "The future is an AI-native software factory. AI tools make people faster. AI-native software factories make retailers competitive in ways customers can actually feel."
• Kartik Kumar, senior vice president, chief digital and technology officer, Catalyst Brands, shared lessons from bringing together JCPenney, Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Lucky Brand, and Nautica under one organization. While the technology landscape is complex — including multiple point-of-sale systems, ERPs, data lakes and digital platforms — he said the harder transformation challenge is aligning people, cultures and ways of working. Catalyst’s approach is to build shared capabilities where it creates growth or removes friction while preserving the distinct identity and customer proposition of each brand. For context, Catalyst Brands is managing significant scale and complexity across five brands, roughly 55 million active customers, 55,000 associates, more than 2,000 stores, and approximately $9 billion in revenue, according to Kumar. “Technology always enables a transformation. People are the one who create transformation. Culture accelerates it."

Tues., Sept. 15

• "Reimagining Fit and Discovery: Bonobos’ Move to Shopify" featured a conversation between Ellen Pope, senior director, e-commerce, Bonobos, and Génesis Miranda Longo, head of customer and industry marketing, Shopify. The session took place on the same morning Bonobos launched its new Shopify-powered site. Pope explained why the digital-native menswear brand moved away from its long-standing custom platform. The migration was driven by the need for greater speed, agility and flexibility — both for customers navigating Bonobos’ complex fit and product choices and for internal teams that needed more control over merchandising, content and experimentation. According to Pope, the migration is intended to create an evolving technology foundation rather than a one-time site relaunch, with Bonobos planning to continue adding tools and ecosystem partners.
• Carrie Skowronski, Founder and CEO, Leadology, served as the opening keynote on Tuesday morning. Successful AI transformation depends as much on trust, empathy and stability as it does on technology, she told the audience. With teams operating at an extraordinary pace of change, leaders need to create an environment where people feel safe enough to experiment, make mistakes and learn, advised Skowronski. She presented empathy not as lowering standards, but as a set of learnable leadership behaviors that can coexist with and strengthen accountability. Skowronski identified five attributes of empathy: perspective taking, staying out of judgment, recognizing emotion, communicating emotion, and mindfulness — which she reframed simply as paying attention. “We can win with AI without leaving our people behind,” Skowronski said.
• A pair of retail executives, Vipin Gopal, Ph.D., senior vice president, chief data and AI officer, Ahold Delhaize USA, and Velia Carboni, chief information officer, SharkNinja, demonstrated different approaches to moving AI from experimentation into practical business use. Gopal focused on deploying AI against specific grocery shopping and fulfillment problems, including meal planning, substitutions and more efficient store picking. He stressed that Ahold Delhaize starts with the problem rather than the technology and retains a human in the loop where associate judgment adds value. Carboni detailed how SharkNinja deliberately “shocked the system” by engaging its entire workforce in AI experimentation, using a companywide hack week to tackle major business problems and then rapidly narrowing the work to the initiatives with the strongest potential. She noted that SharkNinja has emphasized rapid two-week iterations: if a team cannot demonstrate value, leaders reassess the initiative or identify the blockers rather than allowing projects to continue indefinitely. Both presentations emphasized starting with real problems, learning quickly and keeping people central to adoption.
• Davide Mattucci, chief marketing officer, BYLT Basics, shared the story behind the premium men's apparel brand's evolution from a conversion-focused, digital-native company into a broader omnichannel organization. Rising acquisition costs, platform dependency and declining paid media efficiency have made the digital-only growth playbook less sustainable, according to Mattucci. BYLT is responding by treating owned stores and carefully selected wholesale partnerships as complementary growth engines: physical retail builds credibility, creates discovery, strengthens community and loyalty, and can acquire customers with attractive lifetime value. The shift, however, has required BYLT to build operational capabilities that a pure e-commerce model didn't demand, from store assortment and replenishment to wholesale fulfillment and localized merchandising. Mattucci emphasized that channel expansion must start with clarity around the brand, its customer and its market position rather than simply chasing incremental volume. “Clicks are what got us discovered. Connection keeps us chosen.”
• Madalynn Lauria, director, go-to-market strategy, GreyOrange, focused on the gap between collecting enormous volumes of store data and turning that information into useful action. Retail environments can generate signals from RFID readers, handheld devices, cameras, POS systems, ERP platforms and other sensors, but the data has limited value unless retailers can translate it into clear priorities for associates. An intelligence layer above those systems, creating a single view of inventory and converting product movement and location data into tasks such as replenishment, product retrieval and merchandising decisions. Lauria stressed that technology supplies the intelligence, but people create the business outcome by acting on it. “AI can inform us, but it’s the people and the actions that they take that’s going to really bring business value,” said Lauria.
• A panel session featuring Scott Devlin, chief information officer, The Vitamin Shoppe; Kaitlin Hutchinson, senior vice president, e-commerce, Authentic Brands Group; Kristen Stewart, senior vice president, growth, Silver Jeans Co.; Stacey Warshaw, head of digital marketing and e-commerce, LoveShackFancy; and Pat Connolly, Americas lead for customer growth strategy, Accenture Song, explored how generative AI is beginning to reshape product discovery, personalization, brand.com strategy, and the retail technology stack. While AI-driven traffic remains difficult to attribute and relatively small within the overall marketing mix, the panelists agreed that shopper behavior is already changing: consumers are increasingly asking AI tools for answers and recommendations rather than navigating a list of search results. That shift raises the stakes for structured product data, detailed PDP content, credible third-party validation, and strong first-party customer relationships. At the same time, retailers are wary of vendor hype and rapidly changing platforms, favoring measurable proofs of concept, targeted investments and in-house capabilities where possible. The discussion repeatedly returned to a practical theme: retailers should strengthen their data and digital foundations now while remaining flexible about which AI platforms, protocols and use cases ultimately win.
• Steven Bailey, principle, EY Studio+ Americas retail and consumer products Leader, EY, made the argument that retailers should not wait for fully autonomous shopping agents before preparing for agentic commerce. His central premise was that AI shouldn't be treated as another marketing or commerce channel, but as a shopper operating according to rules. As consumer journeys shift from keyword search toward intent-based AI interactions, retailers need to decide what role they want to play in the emerging ecosystem, where humans should retain control, and what product, pricing, inventory, policy and service information should be made machine-readable. Because protocols and standards are still evolving, Bailey recommended focusing on business and data foundations that are unlikely to become obsolete, such as owning customer intent, establishing trusted sources of commercial truth, defining guardrails, and targeting high-friction use cases tied to financial outcomes.
• Tuesday's programming concluded with a keynote presentation from Molly Hjelm, corporate vice president and head of retail media, Ace Hardware. She detailed the launch of Ace Hardware’s RedVest Media to explain what it takes to build a retail media network in a more mature and demanding market. The opportunity remains significant, but Hjelm cautioned that the existence of e-commerce traffic and first-party data no longer guarantees a viable network. Advertisers increasingly expect the same level of measurement, transparency and execution they receive from major digital platforms, while hundreds of RMNs compete for a limited share of brand budgets. Ace therefore built its offering around its distinctive assets: national scale, a large loyalty base, thousands of vendor relationships, independently owned local stores, and a highly trusted connection to homeowners. Hjelm emphasized that retail media should be treated as a retail growth strategy not simply an alternative profit stream, and should create measurable value for the retailer, its vendors and its customers.

Wed., Sept. 16

• The final day of Total Retail Tech started with a conversation between Samantha DoCouto, director of digital product, Sally Beauty, and Aaron Holler, senior director of strategic sales, Rithum. DoCouto described how Sally Beauty is simplifying a rapidly expanding marketplace business spanning Amazon.com, TikTok and last-mile platforms including Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Instacart, with Shipt expected to follow. Rather than changing providers because its existing setup was failing, Sally Beauty consolidated more of the business with Rithum because it wanted a partner that could proactively resolve issues, understand the retailer’s legacy system constraints, and reduce the operational burden on its internal team. The discussion also highlighted a practical AI use case: Sally Beauty and Rithum built an application in Claude to transform product information into the different descriptions, attributes and tags required by each marketplace. The takeaway? Marketplace growth depends not only on integrations, but on flexible partners, disciplined transitions and product data that can move quickly across an increasingly fragmented commerce ecosystem.
• Katherine Black, Americas lead, grocery and retail, partner, Kearney, gave a keynote presentation in which she examined how consumer adoption of AI may evolve beyond research and product discovery toward automation, delegation and eventually transactions. Kearney’s research suggests that AI experimentation is already widespread, but regular use remains far less common, making habit formation an important signal for retailers to watch. Consumers see meaningful potential in AI for automating routine tasks and coordinating complex parts of their lives, yet comfort drops as AI moves from alerting to taking action. Black argued that adoption will accelerate when AI becomes embedded in products and services consumers already use rather than requiring entirely new behaviors. For retailers, the implications extend beyond discoverability: greater price transparency, smaller and more fragmented baskets, new intermediary fees, and fulfillment pressures could affect the P&L. Black's recommendation was to keep investing in brand loyalty while also building differentiated services, trusted data assets, and customer relationships that technology platforms cannot easily replicate. “Habits are where we make money,” Black told the audience of retail executives.
• A panel session featuring Dara Meath, chief technology officer, Build-A-Bear Workshop; Richard Armour, chief digital officer, At Home; Alexandra Bodnar, chief legal and corporate operations officer, ThirdLove; and Jermain Gil, chief growth officer, Good Ranchers, focused on the human side of retail transformation: the skills companies need, how employees can adapt to AI, what keeps teams engaged through constant change, and how organizations identify future leaders. Across companies of different sizes and stages, the panelists repeatedly returned to communication, customer connection, adaptability and culture. They described concrete approaches ranging from companywide AI use-case collection and AI-specific employee KPIs to store immersion, customer service shifts, cross-functional assignments, and 90-day talent planning. Change management emerged as a shared responsibility rather than a project management checkbox. The panelists emphasized explaining the why early, creating regular communication rhythms, involving cross-functional stakeholders, and giving employees meaningful roles in the transformation so new technology becomes something they help shape rather than something that simply happens to them.
• The Total Retail Tech Startup Challenge showcased three early-stage companies applying AI to distinct retail problems: digital quality assurance, product data intelligence, and consumer research. The three participants — Cenker Camci, head of growth, Spur; Jayashree Dutta, CEO, atronous.ai; Onanma Okeke, founder and CEO, Corvane — demonstrated how AI can move beyond isolated automation to help retailers validate digital experiences, improve product discoverability, and make faster, evidence-backed customer decisions. Attendees voted on near- and long-term retail impact and ease of integration, with Spur named the winner.
• Premal Davé, vice president, retail strategy and solutions, TechBlocks interviewed Harish Wairagade, vice president, software engineering, Michaels. Wairagade and Davé examined why many AI initiatives fail to progress beyond pilots and argued that the primary constraint is often the operating model rather than access to AI tools. Using software delivery as an example, Wairagade explained that speeding up coding alone simply moves bottlenecks into testing, reviews, documentation and release processes. The larger opportunity is to embed AI across end-to-end workflows, measure its impact through speed, capacity and business outcomes, and establish governance that enables teams to move faster with clear guardrails.
• Ron Johnson, Apple Store creator; former CEO of J.C. Penney; and author, "Shop Different: How Retail Revealed Apple’s Genius," closed the conference with a look back at how innovation impacted his career, drawing on his experiences at Target and Apple. He distinguished continuous improvement — becoming faster, more productive and more competitive — from innovation that fundamentally changes a company. Through stories about rethinking Target’s kid's assortment, introducing designer collaborations and building the Apple Store, Johnson noted that transformative ideas often emerge from lived experience, close observation and an individual “inner voice,” not from existing data or conventional playbooks. His message for leaders in an AI-rich environment was to use technology aggressively for improvement while preserving the time, judgment and imagination required to create something genuinely new. Johnson advised attendees to "use technology to improve, to get better, to be faster, but don’t use it to do your job. Use it to help you bring yourself to your job."