Technology

More than half of consumers (58 percent) have replaced traditional search engines with generative artificial intelligence tools for product recommendations. That figure was 25 percent just two years earlier. Your next storefront visitor may not be a person at all. It may be a large language model (LLM) deciding whether to recommend your products. Most…

Retail enterprises have never had more tools to reach customers, and customers have never rated them lower. In June 2025, Forrester’s Global CX Index reported that customer experience (CX) quality in North America had hit an all-time low across 469 brands. In the same window, martech still claimed roughly a fifth of marketing budgets at…

For years, retail technology decisions were driven by features. Which platform has the best promotion engine? Which WMS has the most carrier integrations? Which OMS has the most configurable routing logic? Features were how vendors competed and how buyers evaluated. That frame is changing, and the retailers that recognized it earliest are operating with a…

Appriss Retail recently brought together a group of 10 senior retail executives for a closed-door discussion on total retail loss. These were VP-level leaders across loss prevention, finance, operations, e-commerce and customer experience; they’re the minds behind the business and how to plug retail loss. A question was posed: Who operates from a shared loss…

A retailer can spend millions installing the latest inventory management systems, omnichannel fulfillment platforms, and artificial intelligence-driven demand planning technology. But if no one understands the store operations workflows, fulfillment coordination requirements, customer service implications, or how the digital and physical channels actually connect operationally, the business still underperforms.  The technology may function perfectly. The…

Today, B2B commerce teams rely on a patchwork of ERP platforms, spreadsheets, and separate order and inventory tools to run daily operations. Each system owns a piece of the commerce lifecycle. ERP handles pricing, product data, and customer accounts. Other tools manage orders, inventory, and fulfillment. Storefronts power the buyer experience. The issue isn’t the…

For decades, social class has been a useful shorthand for understanding consumers. Income, occupation, and geography have been used as proxies for purchasing power, preference, and brand behavior. However, new consumer data suggests this framework is becoming less reliable as a predictor of behavior. Rather than identifying with one fixed social class, many consumers now…

Change can be incremental, as in the cautionary “boiling frog” tale where a gradual rise in temperature leads to an unfortunate demise before the frog realizes what’s happening. Or change can be fast and furious; look at the disruption artificial intelligence is driving through the traditional path to purchase. Walmart’s introduction of an in-platform app…

Most retailers still think of RFID as a counting tool. The ones gaining ground have figured out it's something else entirely. I've spent the better part of two decades working in retail technology — including in IT at lululemon, at Avery Dennison, and as a vice president of supply chain at PVH — and the…

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the world faster than any previous technology change ever. The next decade of retail will be won by the brands that use technology to deepen human relationships, not replace them. A few weeks ago I stood at the back of a London flagship and watched a sales associate greet a returning…