Artificial Intelligence (AI)

For the past two years, AI has rapidly reshaped how consumers discover and evaluate products. Instead of solely relying on traditional search engines, shoppers are turning to AI assistants and large language models (LLM’s) to research purchases, compare options, and receive recommendations. Now, AI's influence is extending into the transaction itself. Recent announcements from major…

Target on Tuesday announced it has appointed its first ever chief artificial intelligence officer in its latest bet to capitalize on the AI boom, reports CNBC. The company named Chandhu Nair as its chief AI officer and senior vice president and also announced Purvi Shah as the company’s senior vice president of user experience. Nair…

Retail has spent the past two years asking the same question: Which AI model should we use? It's an understandable place to start. New foundation models continue to arrive, each promising faster insights, better recommendations, and more efficient operations. Yet many retailers are discovering that deploying AI is much easier than generating consistent business value…

Food waste sits at the intersection of some of the biggest challenges facing retailers today. As grocers face tighter margins and growing pressure to improve sustainability, how they manage waste in-store has become one of the primary levers they can pull. The scale of the issue is hard to ignore. Global food waste costs have…

Conversations shift fast in retail. A year ago, many were wondering if artificial intelligence was here to stay. Today, the focus has shifted firmly to realizing gains from the many and ever-growing AI investments. Given this sort of change is unprecedented even by technology’s rapid standards, the consequences are real and business value will be…

Retailers have spent the last two decades focused on conversion: driving more traffic, reducing checkout friction, tuning site search, and personalizing the experience. Those things still matter, they just don't answer the question that now decides whether many shoppers buy: What is the customer actually trying to accomplish? That's an intent problem. For years, e-commerce…

Retail’s agentic commerce moment is already underway. Payment processors keep rolling out partnerships and integrations that open the door for nonhuman buyers. It’s the next step in a natural progression of artificial intelligence shaping shoppers’ decisions about what to buy. IBM reports that 41 percent of consumers already use AI to research products, 33 percent…

In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Eugene Yukin, vice president of products at MessageGears, the data activation and engagement platform that helps enterprises harness their data by streamlining the tech stack. Listen in as Yukin discusses his career experience in retail and product (1:10), the MessageGears platform (2:30), and…

Across most organizations, there's a conversation happening amongst marketing leadership that isn't being talked about enough. It goes something like this: "We invested in artificial intelligence. We ran the pilots. We saw productivity gains. So why does our AI bill keep going up?" As AI adoption matures, a new challenge is emerging that few organizations…

For years, retail demand forecasting worked because consumer behavior was relatively consistent. Shoppers gravitated toward familiar brands, orders fell within predictable size ranges, and historical sales data was a reliable guide for inventory decisions. A 2026 consumer survey from Locus found that 45 percent of U.S. shoppers now use artificial intelligence as either a primary…