The Retail Razor: Data Blades Podcast

Proving AI ROI, Agentic commerce, pilot purgatory, and a project called Do Not Replace Bob, live from Shoptalk Fall with Perficient.

64% of retail and consumer leaders don't have reliable data on their own AI ROI. That's from Perficient's new 2026 State of the Industry report, built on a survey of 50 director-level and above leaders, and it's the exact question boards are about to ask every retail CEO.

Recorded live and in person at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, Ricardo sits down with Brandon Rael and Rupa Amin from Perficient to get past the stage talk on agentic commerce and into what it takes to turn AI activity into business results you can prove.

They start with the invisible lost sale: when a consumer's AI shopping agent passes over your product, there's no abandoned cart, no bounce rate, and no trail. Rupa explains why B2B buyers who research with AI still want a rep, and how that changes the rep's job. Then the conversation turns to AI ROI itself: why so many projects can't be measured, why almost half of leaders are funding AI in the wrong order, and how a Perficient project earned the name "Do Not Replace Bob."

What you'll learn in this episode.

• What the invisible lost sale is, and why agentic commerce makes it so hard to see.
• Why AI-referred traffic growth (393%, per Adobe) matters even with about 85% of retail sales still in stores.
• How B2B buyers use AI for product discovery and what they still want from a sales rep.
• Why AI ROI is so hard to prove when the baseline process isn't the one people actually follow.
• Why Brandon says a weak data foundation means "the house is gonna fall down the hill".
• How private label's record 23.8% unit share ties to AI product discovery.
• Why one accountable owner gets AI projects out of pilot mode faster than a committee
• The one thing Rupa says to start this quarter, before the board asks what your AI spend delivered

Support Our Sponsor.
Perficient.
State of the Industry: Retail & Consumer report. https://go.retailrazor.com/Perficient
Powered by 7,000+ advisors, engineers, and designers, Perficient implements AI-first solutions that break conventions and deliver outcomes that matter. Proudly serving clients that represent the world’s most innovative brands, and in collaboration with our powerful technology partner ecosystem, Perficient brings deep industry expertise and data-driven design to redefine how businesses run and succeed.

Insights from 50 retail and consumer decision makers in Perficient's State of the Industry: Retail & Consumer report reveal what makes the difference between the leaders and laggards responding to challenges with AI adoption, investment, and execution. In addition, the report explores how the leaders are approaching emerging trends shaping the future of retail, including agentic commerce, where AI increasingly influences how customers discover products, make decisions, and complete transactions. Explore the research.
 
Subscribe & Follow.

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guests.
Brandon Rael. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonrael/
Director, Retail and Consumer Strategy, Perficient.
Brandon Rael is a Director and Retail Strategist at Perficient and a strategic commerce and Agentic AI commercialization executive. He started his career as a merchant and planner, learning every aspect of retail from the ground up. That operator foundation makes him a different kind of advisor and has shaped everything he has accomplished since.

Brandon advises Fortune 100 companies, private equity-backed brands, and leading retailers on enterprise transformation, AI-enabled growth, merchandising, supply chain, and customer experience. Combining operator, advisor and go-to-market leadership experience, he helps organizations modernize operating models and turn emerging AI capabilities into scalable, adoption-ready solutions. His work consistently delivers measurable business outcomes in revenue growth, EBITDA improvements, cost optimization, and enterprise value creation across retail, grocery, luxury, wholesale, and consumer industries.

Rupa Amin. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupaamin/
Senior Director, Retail & Consumer Strategy, Perficient.
Rupa Amin is Sr. Director of Strategy for the Retail & Consumer Goods practice at Perficient. With over 20 years in commerce spanning manufacturing, distribution, and retail, she helps retail organizations build technology strategies that connect what happens in stores, warehouses, and digital channels to measurable business outcomes.

Rupa specializes in guiding retailers through complex, multi-platform landscapes from order management and product data to customer experience and fulfillment with a focus on what actually works operationally, not just what demos well. Her current areas of focus include AI-driven commerce, inventory and pricing optimization, customer data strategy, and the evolving role of digital in physical retail.

In 2024, she was recognized by Consulting Magazine with the Excellence in Client Service award. Rupa is an active advocate for women in consulting.

Chapters.

(00:00) "We're Not Sure If It Helped": Retail's AI Spend Problem

(00:37) 64% of Retail Leaders Can't Prove Their AI ROI

(03:25) Live at Shoptalk Fall: Turning AI Activity Into Results

(06:08) The Invisible Lost Sale: When AI Shopping Agents Skip You

(09:20) Why B2B Buyers Still Want a Sales Rep in the AI Era

(13:16) Do Not Replace Bob: The Hidden Baseline Killing Your ROI

(16:27) Half of Leaders Are Funding AI in the Wrong Order

(20:23) Private Label Is Surging: Can AI Even Find Your Product?

(23:11) Escaping Pilot Purgatory: Ownership Beats Committees

(27:46) The One Thing to Do Monday Morning Before the Board Asks

(31:01) Show Close

About your Hosts.
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music.

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Deck Commerce CEO Chris Deck on AI order orchestration, the missing execution layer, and why order management drives growth.

One online order. Five boxes. One customer. Chris Deck, Founder and CEO of Deck Commerce, ran a couple weeks of an apparel brand's inventory and sales data through an AI order management simulation and found that order could ship in two boxes. Split shipments dropped by 3X, and four zones came off the shipping distance.

Recorded live and in-person at RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, this episode of Data Blades points AI at the part of retail that rarely makes the keynote: AI order management. Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden talk with Chris about how AI order orchestration starts with a human in the middle, why B2B and DTC teams now share the same meetings, where brands get stuck when they ask an ERP to run modern commerce, and what Black Friday scale requires from every system around the order.

What you'll learn in this episode.
•       How an AI simulation on a couple weeks of order data found 3X fewer split shipments and four fewer shipping zones, with results in about a week.
•       Why Chris calls that tool version one of agentic order orchestration, and why a person still approves the changes.
•       Why B2B teams still working in EDI, spreadsheets, and fax are studying how DTC order management works.
•       What the "execution layer" is, and why systems of record like ERP and WMS make a poor stand-in.
•       What Black Friday scale demands: finance close, loyalty updates, payment capture, and real-time order status, all in sync.
•       Why a "where's my order?" chatbot treats the symptom only.
•       The four-part case Chris makes for order management as "the engine of growth for the next wave of commerce" (jump to 18:18).

Support Our Sponsor.
Deck Commerce. https://www.deckcommerce.com/
Deck Commerce helps growing brands solve what happens after the buy button.
As order volume, channels, inventory, and fulfillment networks get more complex, Deck provides the intelligent orchestration layer that connects it all, helping brands make smarter order and fulfillment decisions, automate operations, and deliver a better customer experience at scale.

Subscribe & Follow.

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest.
Christopher Deck. https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-deck/
Founder and CEO, Deck Commerce. https://www.deckcommerce.com/

Chris Deck is the Founder and CEO of Deck Commerce, an enterprise order management platform built to help modern brands manage the complexity of digital commerce, omnichannel fulfillment, inventory visibility, and customer service.

With more than 20 years of experience across eCommerce, retail operations, and enterprise technology, Chris has spent his career helping brands connect the front-end customer experience with the operational systems required to deliver on that promise. His work sits at the intersection of commerce platforms, ERP, warehouse and fulfillment networks, stores, marketplaces, and customer service systems.

Under Chris’s leadership, Deck Commerce has become a trusted OMS partner for leading retail and consumer brands navigating growth, modernization, and operational scale. The platform supports high-volume order orchestration, complex fulfillment logic, distributed inventory, customer service workflows, and integration across the broader commerce technology ecosystem.

Chris speaks frequently about the future of commerce infrastructure, including omnichannel operations, inventory optimization, AI-enabled order management, and the emerging role of intelligent systems in helping brands make faster, more accurate operational decisions. His perspective is grounded in the belief that the next era of commerce will be defined not only by better digital experiences, but by the operational intelligence required to fulfill them profitably and reliably.

Chapters

(00:00) One Order, Five Boxes: How AI Cut It to Two

(00:37) The Unglamorous AI Play Retailers Are Overlooking

(03:45) The AI Simulation That Cut 4 Shipping Zones and 3X the Splits

(07:10) B2B and D2C Stopped Fighting. Here's Why

(10:54) Why Brands Get Stuck: The Missing Execution Layer

(14:36) Black Friday Scale Is About More Than Order Volume

(16:09) Stop Building Chatbots for "Where's My Order?"

(18:00) Order Management Is the Engine of Growth

(20:27) Stay Sharp: Follow Data Blades

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Arizona State University’s Brett Duarte on AI supply chain strategy, part 3: AI in logistics, control towers, network design, and supply chain governance.

Logistics is a $10 trillion industry once you add up freight, transportation, warehousing, 3PL and 4PL. Brett Duarte puts that number on the table in the first four minutes, and it reframes every AI conversation that follows. This is how AI in logistics either earns its budget or quietly doesn't.

This is part three, the final episode of our AI supply chain strategy series with Clinical Associate Professor Brett Duarte of Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business. We covered procurement in part one and operations in part two. Here we finish with logistics, then widen the lens to the infrastructure and supply chain governance that everything else sits on.

Brett splits AI in logistics into tactical and strategic work. Tactical includes route optimization and ETA prediction, capacity and load optimization so containers and trailers run full, and disruption management through control towers that sense a problem and act on it. Strategic means network design: where distribution centers go, how big their footprint needs to be, where the coverage gaps are, and whether carbon emissions can come down at the same time to address sustainability.

Then Casey pushes him on the part executives keep asking about. Trusted data sources. Platform choices. Agent-to-agent protocolsand model context protocol. Managing a growing population of agents and their lifecycle. And the ROI roadmap with KPIs that leadership will accept. Brett's line on supply chain governance is the one worth writing down: it's a business capability, and companies that treat it as an IT project pay for it later.

What you'll learn in this episode.

• Why the $10 trillion logistics number changes how you size an AI business case.
• Where AI in logistics pays off first, and which use case to build before all the others.
• The four tactical AI use cases Brett teaches first, and why disruption management is the one to start with.
• How a control tower agent pulls outside signals on weather, earthquakes and disruption events, then decides which orders are affected.
• What "citizen developers" can build inside operations, and the guardrails they need.
• The network design questions AI answers: DC placement, footprint, service versus cost, coverage gaps, consolidation.
• Why sustainability documentation is turning into a competitive edge instead of a spreadsheet chore.
• Brett's case that supply chain governance is a business capability, not an IT project.
• How to build an AI ROI roadmap, pick operational and financial KPIs, and benchmark against your market.
• The AI-native platform versus bolt-on-to-legacy decision, with the tradeoffs on both sides.

 
The program behind the series.
Each episode in this series follows one day of ASU's AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program, October 5 to 7 in Tempe. This episode is day three. Seats are limited for the fall session. Register with the link below and ID code RETAILRAZORASU for $1,500 off.
Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off

Listen to all three parts in the series.
The series is built to be heard together. Part 1 covers procurement, part 2 covers operations, part 3 covers logistics plus infrastructure and supply chain governance. Start at part one if you're arriving late.
•       Part 1, Procurement (S2E13): https://go.retailrazor.com/DBs2e13
•       Part 2, Operations (S2E14): https://go.retailrazor.com/DBs2e14

Support Our Sponsors.
There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival.
From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment. Late registration is now available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.
Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.

Subscribe & Follow.

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest.
Brett Duarte, Ph.D. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettduarte/
Arizona State University | W. P. Carey School of Business
NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management
Clinical Associate Professor
Senior Faculty Co-Director – MSBA
wpcarey.asu.edu | research.wpcarey.asu.edu
Brett Duarte is a Clinical Associate Professor in the NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, the largest business school in the United States with more than 25,000 students. He is senior faculty co-director of the school's Master of Science in Business Analytics program and assistant chair for graduate programs in supply chain. ASU's supply chain management program is ranked #2 in the country by U.S. News and World Report. Brett is on the faculty teaching the AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program this October.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:35) Show Intro

(03:31) The $10 Trillion Logistics Problem AI Is About to Solve

(04:42) Inside Amazon & DHL's AI Playbook

(05:55) How AI Agents Catch Supply Chain Disasters Before They Happen

(08:20) The Network Design Mistake Costing You Millions

(09:49) Why Sustainability Data Is Your Next Competitive Edge

(11:27) The Governance Mistake That Could Sink Your AI Strategy

(13:54) How to Actually Measure AI's ROI in Your Supply Chain

(16:36) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Arizona State University's Brett Duarte on AI supply chain strategy, part 2: demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and safety stock

Get your forecast wrong in one direction and you've got empty shelves. Get it wrong the other way and you've got a warehouse full of product nobody wants. Professor Brett Duarte pointed to Amazon reporting a 35% reduction in stockouts from its AI inventory tools. So which parts of the AI promise hold up in supply chain operations?

Season 2, Episode 14 of Data Blades continues our 3-part mini-series with Professor Brett Duarte of Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business. The series follows ASU's AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy executive program running October 5 to 7 on the Tempe campus. Part 1 covered procurement. Part 2 moves downstream into operations, where a forecast turns into inventory and inventory turns into either a sale or a markdown.

Brett walks through the AI demand forecasting toolkit layer by layer: extrapolation from historical data, regression and econometric models, machine learning for nonlinear patterns, and large language models acting as a reasoning layer on top. That top layer handles what he calls narrative synthesis and multi-source fusion, pulling qualitative signals like a Wall Street Journal article on consumer sentiment, the consumer price index, or inflation data into the forecast.

Casey admits capacity planning in ERP often felt like "pretend functionality." Ricardo describes the retail version of real time: however fast someone can update the spreadsheet. Then Brett turns to inventory optimization, where AI moves teams off static reorder points and monthly forecasts. He describes an agent that senses a demand spike, raises a purchase order, checks the supplier contract for budget limits and terms, sends routine orders automatically, and routes important ones to a human. He closes on multi-echelon inventory optimization and why the location of your safety stock matters as much as the amount.

What you'll learn in this episode.

• Why AI demand forecasting and inventory optimization are two halves of one decision [00:03:43]
• How AI demand forecasting stacks extrapolation, regression, machine learning, and LLMs [00:06:14]
• What narrative synthesis and multi-source fusion mean for a forecast that can read the news [00:07:07]
• Why forecasting is moving from Python code into the hands of managers and executives [00:08:31]
• How AI agents replace the days of manual spreadsheet updates behind a forecast [00:09:43]
• How AI agents adjust safety stock and raise purchase orders, and when a human steps in [00:12:14]
• What multi-echelon inventory optimization is and why it's a strategic decision [00:13:10]

 
Next Episode.
Part 3 finishes the map with logistics: routing, network design, control towers, last mile, and what AI can do when a shipment goes sideways. Then we widen the lens to the question every executive eventually asks their supply chain team: what's the infrastructure, the governance, and the ROI case before anything gets funded? And we'll bring procurement, operations, and logistics together as one strategy. Follow Data Blades so you don't miss it.

Support Our Sponsors.
There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival.
From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment. Late registration is now available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.
Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.

Subscribe & Follow.

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest.
Brett Duarte, Ph.D. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettduarte/
Arizona State University | W. P. Carey School of Business
NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management
Clinical Associate Professor
Senior Faculty Co-Director – MSBA
wpcarey.asu.edu | research.wpcarey.asu.edu
Brett Duarte is a Clinical Associate Professor in the NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, the largest business school in the United States with more than 25,000 students. He is senior faculty co-director of the school's Master of Science in Business Analytics program and assistant chair for graduate programs in supply chain. ASU's supply chain management program is ranked #2 in the country by U.S. News and World Report. Brett is on the faculty teaching the AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program this October.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:27) Show Intro

(03:25) Welcome Back Professor Brett Duarte

(05:03) Why Forecasting Matters

(06:14) Modern AI Forecasting Toolkit

(09:43) Real Time Agents In Practice

(10:29) Inventory Management Focus

(12:14) Dynamic Replenishment Workflows

(13:10) Strategic Multi Echelon Optimization

(14:11) Wrap Up And Next Episode

(15:28) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Arizona State University’s Brett Duarte on AI supply chain strategy, part 1: procurement, supplier risk, and contract intelligence

Boston Consulting Group found AI leaders doubling revenue on specific projects and cutting costs 40 to 50%. McKinsey found that under 1% of organizations that adopted AI have seen enterprise-wide impact. The distance between those two numbers is the whole job of an AI supply chain strategy.

Season 2, Episode 13 of Data Blades opens a 3-part mini-series with Professor Brett Duarte of Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, home to the #2 ranked supply chain program in the country. The series follows ASU's AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy executive program running October 5 to 7 on the Tempe campus: procurement in part 1, operations in part 2, logistics in part 3.

Today we start where the money starts. Brett names the two things supply chain leaders keep hitting. First, infrastructure: siloed systems, data quality problems, fragmentation, and AI "slapped on the legacy systems" so nobody can see the supply chain end to end. Second, adoption, which is just whether employees pick the tools up and use them.

Then he gets specific about agentic AI in procurement. Agents are a digital workforce that can plan, reason, act, and learn. A procurement agent pulls structured and unstructured data, reads a new tariff into a pricing picture, runs sentiment analysis on news about a supplier or a region, and automates the supplier back-and-forth that used to live in email threads and manual ERP lookups. A contract agent reads the whole contract portfolio, flags what has expired or is up for renewal, checks terms against real purchase orders and delivery performance, and schedules the renegotiation conversation with evidence attached.

Casey and Ricardo also get into what supplier scorecards and Kraljic matrix segmentation look like when an agent maintains them, and why ASU built an AI lab with a supply chain digital twin to watch how agents behave when a disruption hits.

What you'll learn in this episode.

• Why AI pilots keep working while enterprise-wide impact stalls, and the two blockers Brett hears most from supply chain leaders  [00:04:59]
• How ASU's three-part mission shows up as an AI lab and a supply chain digital twin for testing agents against simulated disruptions  [00:07:21]
• What the 3-day AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy program covers, day by day, and who it's built for  [00:09:15]
• Agentic AI explained: plan, reason, act, learn, and the maturity curve from AI assistant to automated workflows to a frontier firm  [00:12:16]
• Why executives build their own agent in the room, then watch three agents talk to each other through a simulated disruption [00:14:08]
• Where agentic AI in procurement lands first: tactical work like supplier identification and purchase orders, strategic work like spend analytics, category management, and supplier risk  [00:15:22]
• How a contract agent handles renewals, terms violations, delivery misses, and supplier scorecards, and where the Kraljic matrix fits  [00:17:12]

 
Next Episode.
Part 2 moves downstream into operations: forecasting, inventory, and the gap between a model that predicts well and a business that acts on it. If procurement is where you decide what to buy, operations is where you find out whether you got it right. Taken together, the three parts cover a full AI supply chain strategy from the front end to the back. Follow Data Blades so you don't miss it.

Support Our Sponsors.
There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival.
From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment. Late registration is now available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.
Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.

Subscribe & Follow.

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest.
Brett Duarte, Ph.D. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettduarte/
Arizona State University | W. P. Carey School of Business
NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management
Clinical Associate Professor
Senior Faculty Co-Director – MSBA
wpcarey.asu.edu | research.wpcarey.asu.edu
Brett Duarte is a Clinical Associate Professor in the NASPO Department of Supply Chain Management at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, the largest business school in the United States with more than 25,000 students. He is senior faculty co-director of the school's Master of Science in Business Analytics program and assistant chair for graduate programs in supply chain. ASU's supply chain management program is ranked #2 in the country by U.S. News and World Report. Brett is on the faculty teaching the AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy Executive Program this October.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:29) Show Intro

(04:18) Welcome & Introductions

(04:59) AI Adoption Challenges

(07:21) ASU's Three-Part Mission

(09:15) AI Enablement Program Overview

(12:14) Understanding Agentic AI

(14:08) Building Agents Hands-On

(15:22) Procurement & Sourcing Use Cases

(17:12) Contract Management & Supplier Risk

(19:57) Wrapping Up Part One

(20:44) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

S2E12 NRA Chief Economist Dr. Chad Moutray on what restaurant technology really does to staffing

Everyone assumes restaurant automation means fewer jobs. The National Restaurant Association’s data says 94% of operators cut zero: their technology investments over the past two to three years did not permanently eliminate a single role.

In the finale of our three-part hiring and staffing series, Dr. Chad Moutray, Chief Economist and SVP of Industry Research and Knowledge at the National Restaurant Association, joins Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden to close the loop on restaurant technology and restaurant staffing. We started our 3-part mini-series with a cooling labor market, moved through the cost of being short-staffed, and covered how to keep your best people. This episode answers the question every operator is asking: where does technology fit?

Chad walks through where restaurant technology delivers the clearest wins, from cutting hiring time from weeks to a few days, to chatbots that screen and schedule interviews at 2 a.m. while a manager sleeps, to onboarding and retention tools that keep new hires on the floor faster. He is candid about the tradeoffs too: new tools usually add work before they save it, and teams often need reskilling, so the human touch stays at the center.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why 94% of operators kept every role after investing in restaurant technology
• How the 2.8% full-service profit margin drives every restaurant staffing decision
• Where technology cuts restaurant hiring from weeks to days
• How chatbots and self-scheduling meet applicants where they are
• Why the human touch is the one thing automation can’t replace in hospitality

Resource Links
HIRING & STAFFING How Onboarding, Managers, & Technology Drive Restaurant ROI.https://www.restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/research-insight-workforce-hiring-staffing/
State of the Restaurant Industry 2026. https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/state-of-the-industry/

Support Our Sponsor
This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.
Retail Club AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Join 2,000 retail leaders for a fully outdoor, beachside deep dive into how AI is reshaping retail. Qualified retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

Subscribe & Follow

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest
Dr Chad Moutray, Ph.D., CBE, https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadmoutray/
Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge
National Restaurant Association, https://www.restaurant.org/

Chad Moutray is senior vice president for research & knowledge and chief economist at the National Restaurant Association, where he leads economic analysis, data-driven insights, and thought leadership for business leaders in the restaurant and foodservice industry. A recognized expert on economic trends, he frequently shares his perspectives through professional presentations, media interviews, and industry reports.

Dr. Moutray is an adjunct professor at George Washington University, where he teaches econometrics in the M.S. in the applied economics program. He has held leadership roles in several professional organizations, including serving as chair of the Conference of Business Economists and as a board member of the National Association for Business Economics. He is also a past president and chairman of the National Economists Club, the Washington, D.C. chapter of NABE. In 2026, he will begin serving on the board of trustees of the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, VA.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:40) Show Intro

(02:48) Welcome Back Chad Moutray!

(03:38) Robots Taking Jobs

(04:11) Tech Boosts Efficiency

(06:20) Hiring Process Wins

(08:18) Chatbots and Scheduling

(09:29) Onboarding and Retention

(10:53) Hospitality vs Automation

(12:34) Employee Buy In

(14:24) Big Takeaways 2026

(16:58) Where to Find Report

(17:48) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

S2E11 NRA Chief Economist Dr. Chad Moutray on retention, managers, and the first 90 days

A new restaurant hire costs you money until roughly day 32. For a manager, it’s 72. If they walk before that, you didn’t just lose a person, you lost the investment. In Part 2 of our Hiring & Staffing series, Dr. Chad Moutray, Chief Economist at the National Restaurant Association, breaks down the numbers behind restaurant employee retention - when a new hire becomes “net positive,” why the first 90 days decide everything, and how one weak manager can pull a whole team out the door.

We get into the 31.8-day math for hourly staff, the 72.2-day math for managers, and why restaurant manager retention is the highest-leverage bet an operator on a tight budget can make.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• What “net positive” really means, and the day a hire starts paying off
• The 31.8 vs 72.2-day gap between hourly staff and managers
• Why the first 30 to 90 days is the highest-turnover window
• The leadership traits that drive restaurant employee retention
• Where to invest first when the budget is tight (hint: onboarding)
• A scavenger-hunt onboarding idea one operator actually uses

 
Next episode: we close the series on how technology is reshaping restaurant hiring and training, without replacing the human touch that makes hospitality work.
 
Resource Links
HIRING & STAFFING How Onboarding, Managers, & Technology Drive Restaurant ROI.https://www.restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/research-insight-workforce-hiring-staffing/
State of the Restaurant Industry 2026. https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/state-of-the-industry/

Support Our Sponsor
This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.
Retail Club AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Join 2,000 retail leaders for a fully outdoor, beachside deep dive into how AI is reshaping retail. Qualified retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

Subscribe & Follow

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest
Dr Chad Moutray, Ph.D., CBE, https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadmoutray/
Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge
National Restaurant Association, https://www.restaurant.org/

Chad Moutray is senior vice president for research & knowledge and chief economist at the National Restaurant Association, where he leads economic analysis, data-driven insights, and thought leadership for business leaders in the restaurant and foodservice industry. A recognized expert on economic trends, he frequently shares his perspectives through professional presentations, media interviews, and industry reports.

Dr. Moutray is an adjunct professor at George Washington University, where he teaches econometrics in the M.S. in the applied economics program. He has held leadership roles in several professional organizations, including serving as chair of the Conference of Business Economists and as a board member of the National Association for Business Economics. He is also a past president and chairman of the National Economists Club, the Washington, D.C. chapter of NABE. In 2026, he will begin serving on the board of trustees of the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, VA.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:30) Show Intro

(02:41) Welcome Back, Dr Chad Moutray!

(03:47) What Net Positive Means

(05:28) The 32 and 72 Day Math

(07:00) Managers Make or Break Teams

(08:41) Surviving the First 90 Days

(10:14) Leadership Traits That Retain

(12:33) Where to Invest First

(13:26) Onboarding Ideas and Scavenger Hunt

(15:01) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

S2E10 NRA Chief Economist Dr. Chad Moutray on the 2026 labor market, 122% turnover, and the price of running a shift short

One missing employee can cost a restaurant $3,000 to $5,000 in lost sales over three months. That's one stat from the National Restaurant Association's new 2026 Hiring & Staffing report, and it's why we built a three-part mini-series around the labor market in restaurants.

In Part 1, NRA Chief Economist Dr. Chad Moutray joins Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden to read the restaurant labor market in real time, recorded days after fresh JOLTS and monthly jobs data in June. The labor market has cooled from the Great Resignation into what economists now call the Great Stay, and restaurant staffing looks easier on paper: understaffing fell from 78% of operators in 2021 to 22% in 2025. Chad explains why that 22% still bleeds real money, how a single empty shift cuts sales 7 to 8% per meal period, and why a 122% turnover rate means the average restaurant replaces its entire staff every year.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Where the restaurant labor market stands after the latest jobs data (48,000 restaurant jobs added in May, 220,000 over 12 months).
• Why job openings outnumbering the unemployed is a structural signal, and what shrinking demographics mean for restaurant staffing over the next decade.
• The true cost of understaffing: hundreds of dollars per shift, $3K to $5K per missing frontline worker, and the morale spiral that follows.
• Why half of Americans got their first job in a restaurant, and what that training ground teaches.
• How technology cuts hiring from weeks to days without touching the high-touch service that keeps guests coming back.

Part 2 covers employee engagement and retention, including how long a new hire takes to become net positive. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

Resource Links
HIRING & STAFFING How Onboarding, Managers, & Technology Drive Restaurant ROI.https://www.restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/research-insight-workforce-hiring-staffing/
State of the Restaurant Industry 2026. https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/research-reports/state-of-the-industry/

Support Our Sponsor
This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.
Retail Club AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Join 2,000 retail leaders for a fully outdoor, beachside deep dive into how AI is reshaping retail. Qualified retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

Subscribe & Follow

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest
Dr Chad Moutray, Ph.D., CBE, https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadmoutray/
Chief Economist & Sr Vice President of Industry Research & Knowledge
National Restaurant Association, https://www.restaurant.org/

Chad Moutray is senior vice president for research & knowledge and chief economist at the National Restaurant Association, where he leads economic analysis, data-driven insights, and thought leadership for business leaders in the restaurant and foodservice industry. A recognized expert on economic trends, he frequently shares his perspectives through professional presentations, media interviews, and industry reports.

Dr. Moutray is an adjunct professor at George Washington University, where he teaches econometrics in the M.S. in the applied economics program. He has held leadership roles in several professional organizations, including serving as chair of the Conference of Business Economists and as a board member of the National Association for Business Economics. He is also a past president and chairman of the National Economists Club, the Washington, D.C. chapter of NABE. In 2026, he will begin serving on the board of trustees of the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, VA.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:37) Show Intro

(03:02) Welcome, Dr Chad Moutray!

(04:24) Labor Market Snapshot

(06:34) Seasonality and Consumer Demand

(08:20) Restaurants as Training Ground

(09:09) Why Hospitality Skills Matter

(13:29) Understaffing Trends Today

(15:08) Turnover and Onboarding Reality

(16:45) True Cost of Empty Shifts

(18:31) Tech That Speeds Hiring

(20:01) Service as Competitive Edge

(20:56) Key Takeaways and Demographics

(24:11) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

S2E9 Greg Buzek of IHL Group on RFID, Computer Vision, Edge Computing, and the Returns Opportunity with AI

Buy online pickup in store sounds like a solved problem. It’s not. In IHL Group’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study, only 18.2% of retailers have optimized BOPIS, and the most profitable retailers are a staggering 555% more likely to have it dialed in than the laggards. In the finale of our 3-part AI in Retail miniseries, Greg Buzek, President and Chief AI Orchestrator at IHL Group, joins Ricardo and Casey to unpack the connected supply chain, the unglamorous infrastructure quietly separating retail’s winners from everyone else.

This is the conclusion of our three-part run with Greg. We started with shelf intelligence, moved to the augmented associate, and now we land on the part of retail that keeps executives up at night: supply chain and returns. If you want to understand why the connected supply chain decides who wins on margin in 2026, start here.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
●      Why the most profitable retailers are 555% more likely to have buy online pickup in store fully optimized, and why only about 18% of the industry has solved BOPIS
●      How RFID and computer vision became the two technologies separating winners from laggards on inventory accuracy in the connected supply chain
●      Why computer vision now runs on the edge for under $500, on hardware as simple as a Raspberry Pi tapping into cameras you already own
●      How edge computing ties RFID and computer vision together so you only process what moved
●      Reverse logistics and retail returns: why a $25 item is often cheaper to give away than to take back
●      Aspirational sizing and the 90%-plus return rate on women’s dresses bought online, and how true fit technology with AI changes the math
●      Return fraud, knockoffs, and how RFID plus computer vision verify whether an item was ever in your connected supply chain
●      The one 2026 priority Greg would give every supply chain leader: clean data and a single version of the truth

The Numbers That Matter
●      555% more likely: profit winners vs. laggards with BOPIS fully optimized
●      18.2% of retailers have optimized buy online pickup in store
●      1,600% more likely: leaders using RFID vs. laggards
●      160x more likely: sales winners (10%+ growth) are using RFID
●      90%+ return rate on women’s dresses bought online
●      48% of retail sales are now walk-in, walk-out; the other 52% runs through fulfillment models most retailers haven’t optimized


Resource Links
How Retail Leaders Outperform - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/how-retail-leaders-outperform/
Shelf Intelligence Report - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/shelf-intelligence-report-rebuilding-retail-relationships-through-automation/
Adapt or Be Outpaced - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/adapt-or-be-outpaced-tech-imperative-for-retails-midmarket/
Fixing Inventory Distortion - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/fixing-inventory-distortion-whos-winning-whos-failing-whats-working/
Closing the Execution Gap - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/closing-the-execution-gap/

Support Our Sponsors
This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.
Retail Club AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Join 2,000 retail leaders for a fully outdoor, beachside deep dive into how AI is reshaping retail. Qualified retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

Subscribe & Follow

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest
Greg Buzek. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbuzek/
IHL Group. https://www.ihlservices.com/
RetailROI. https://www.retailroi.org
Greg Buzek is the Founder, President and Principal Analyst of IHL Group, one of the most respected retail technology research firms in the world. IHL's annual Retail Transformation Study is the largest survey of retail technology leaders in the industry, covering more than 400 brands across every retail segment. Greg is also the founder of Retail Orphan Initiative (Retail ROI), which this week surpassed $6 million in total grants to help children around the world through the industry's Super Saturday campaign.

Noted by RIS News as one of the Top 10 Influentials in Retail and the National Retail Federation as one of “The List of People Shaping Retail’s Future“, he has a Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from The Ohio State University, and 30 years of experience in retail market analysis, business planning, product development, and consulting with Fortune 500 companies. He is also a member of the Top 100 Retail Influencers from RETHINK Retail.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:46) Show Intro

(04:05) Welcome Back, Greg Buzek!

(07:09) Inventory Accuracy Tech Stack

(10:01) Computer Vision Goes Edge

(15:18) Returns and Reverse Logistics

(20:50) Return Fraud and Smart Mirrors

(26:04) 2026 Priorities Clean Data

(29:35) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

 

S2E8 Greg Buzek of IHL Group on the AI Hiring Gap the Retail Industry Got Backwards

For two years, every conference stage and every headline has told you the same thing. AI is coming for retail jobs. The robots are taking over. Store headcount is doomed. The data tells a completely different story, and it is not close.

In part two of our three-part AI in Retail series, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit back down with Greg Buzek, President and Chief AI Orchestrator at IHL Group, to take apart the doom narrative with hard numbers from IHL’s 2026 Retail Transformation Study. The retailers deploying the most AI in their stores are adding store associates at nearly double the rate of everyone else. Edge-current retailers plan to grow store headcount at 70% versus 36% for their peers. The fastest-growing retailers are 115% more likely to be adding people, not cutting them.

This is the augmented associate model, and it’s the through-line of the whole episode. The winning retailers treat AI as a tool to augment store associates rather than replace them. Greg traces it all the way back to self-checkout 25 years ago, when Kroger trained its best people to teach customers and then moved staff to fresh-food profit centers, while Kmart simply bolted in machines, cut labor, and flamed out. Same technology, opposite outcomes.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
·       The self-checkout history that predicts who wins and loses with AI in retail
·       Why store associates blame every staffing change on AI, and the over-communication fix that works
·       The augmented associate toolkit: voice in an associate’s native language, mobile devices, assisted selling, and instant order history
·       Why edge computing, not the cloud, is quietly deciding which retailers can scale AI in the store
·       The two things AI needs more than anything else: the network and clean data
·       How buy online pickup in store, returns, and last mile delivery are all adding store associates instead of removing them
·       Why roughly 18% of retail sales now run through reverse logistics, and where the margin recovery hides
·       The restaurant handheld lesson Greg has tracked for 15 years, and why turning tables twice as fast drops straight to the bottom line

Greg’s bottom line lands hard. The retailers cutting store associates to look efficient on a spreadsheet are the ones falling behind. The winners are connecting store associates to data, handing them better tools than the customer walks in with, and getting the store network right before anything else. If you make one retail workforce decision this year, this episode is the one to hear first.

Resource Links
How Retail Leaders Outperform - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/how-retail-leaders-outperform/
Shelf Intelligence Report - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/shelf-intelligence-report-rebuilding-retail-relationships-through-automation/
Adapt or Be Outpaced - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/adapt-or-be-outpaced-tech-imperative-for-retails-midmarket/
Fixing Inventory Distortion - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/fixing-inventory-distortion-whos-winning-whos-failing-whats-working/
Closing the Execution Gap - https://www.ihlservices.com/product/closing-the-execution-gap/

Support Our Sponsors
This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.
Retail Club AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Join 2,000 retail leaders for a fully outdoor, beachside deep dive into how AI is reshaping retail. Qualified retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

Subscribe & Follow

Love this episode? Drop us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Don't forget to like and subscribe to The Retail Razor: Data Blades for more episodes on customer experience, retail marketing, AI in retail, and data‑driven transformation!

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/
Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

About Our Guest
Greg Buzek. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregbuzek/
IHL Group. https://www.ihlservices.com/
RetailROI. https://www.retailroi.org
Greg Buzek is the Founder, President and Principal Analyst of IHL Group, one of the most respected retail technology research firms in the world. IHL's annual Retail Transformation Study is the largest survey of retail technology leaders in the industry, covering more than 400 brands across every retail segment. Greg is also the founder of Retail Orphan Initiative (Retail ROI), which this week surpassed $6 million in total grants to help children around the world through the industry's Super Saturday campaign.

Noted by RIS News as one of the Top 10 Influentials in Retail and the National Retail Federation as one of “The List of People Shaping Retail’s Future“, he has a Masters Degree in Business Administration (MBA) from The Ohio State University, and 30 years of experience in retail market analysis, business planning, product development, and consulting with Fortune 500 companies. He is also a member of the Top 100 Retail Influencers from RETHINK Retail.

Chapters

(00:00) Teaser

(00:40) Show Intro

(03:32) Welcome back, Greg Buzek!

(04:22) Self Checkout Lessons

(08:11) Augmented Associate Tools

(10:17) Voice and Language Support

(11:54) Edge Computing Advantage

(13:18) Network and Clean Data

(14:31) Enabling Tech and IT Spend

(16:25) Mobile Tools and Pickup Wins

(18:25) Last Mile Delivery Staffing

(21:24) Making the Investment Case

(23:16) Returns and Fulfillment Focus

(25:42) Restaurant Speed Example

(29:15) Key Takeaways and Wrap

(31:27) Show Close

About your Hosts
Helping you cut through the clutter in retail data insights:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Music

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Tech Lore from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.