Personalization

Personalization isn’t coming back. It’s being reinterpreted by a new generation. We’re now seeing fun, custom pieces that mean monograms are a must-have. As back-to-school shopping enters crunch time, we’re seeing a surge across the board. From elementary school backpacks to college dorm rooms, customization is the essential finishing touch, and retailers that treat it…

Retail media has had a strong run. By placing ads inside their owned digital properties, including search results, product pages, and checkout flows, retailers built high-margin ad businesses on top of their existing infrastructure. The model works because the shopper is already on their site, engaged and, theoretically, ready to buy. But what about the…

Personalization in retail has scaled a higher altitude in 2026. Consumers expect brands to not only recognize and remember them as unique individuals in the moment, but also to anticipate their needs as they change. A Capgemini Research Institute report shows that 71 percent of consumers want generative artificial intelligence to be integrated into their…

Remember Jarvis from "Iron Man"? Before generative artificial intelligence became part of everyday conversation, Tony Stark had something most of us could only imagine — an intelligent assistant that understood context, anticipated needs, answered questions, and helped him make decisions in real time. Jarvis wasn't just a search engine. He wasn't a static database of…

Most email strategies are still built around campaigns, but performance is coming from somewhere else. Automated flows make up just 6 percent of sends, yet generate $513 per 1,000 emails compared to $62 for campaigns. That is an 8x difference. And this pattern shows up consistently across North American e-commerce brands. The math is clear:…

Retail media has quickly become one of the most important growth engines in commerce. Retailers are increasingly monetizing their digital properties, from search results and product pages to apps and email, by enabling brands to promote their products directly within the shopping journey. Yet despite its rapid growth, many retailers still hesitate to fully embrace…

Retailers are finally realizing that their customer data can pay for itself. For years, brands have treated first-party data as a cost of doing business, but now it's being redefined as a monetizable asset. Purchase history, browsing behavior, loyalty engagement, and customer preferences are becoming foundational inputs for personalization and performance measurement. Most organizations recognize…

The retail landscape has undergone more transformation in the last 24 months than in the previous decade. While the past few years were defined by the rise of enterprise artificial intelligence optimizing supply chains and back-office efficiencies, 2026 marks the year the "AI agent" officially takes the driver’s seat in the consumer journey. As we…

Personalization may be the promise, but the retail experience that customers get from their favorite brands often tells a different story. Despite claims of sophisticated, advanced and "personalized" engagement, many retailers still group customers by generic segments that look similar on paper, such as demographics or purchase history. This approach overlooks the fundamental requirement of…

If technology matures at a pace closer to dog years than human, then we’ve already witnessed a century of conversational intelligence since Siri first appeared on our iPhones 15 years ago. As ChatGPT and a constellation of other large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve at an exponential speed and scale, legacy interactive voice response…