Christine Russo sits down with Lisa Pisano, Chief Revenue Officer at Knitwell Group, and Heather Gruccio, EVP/Chief Merchandising Officer at Ann Taylor, to talk about what a nearly two-decade partnership with nonprofit Delivering Good actually looks like when it's built into the DNA of an organization. Not just a line item on a giving report.

Pisano, a Delivering Good board member, traces the relationship back to 2007, when it started with Ann Loft and grew across all of Knitwell's brands. With 20 million customers and 45,000 associates across the portfolio, she makes the case that scale is not just a metric. It's a responsibility.

Gruccio brings the brand perspective. Ann Taylor's Buy a Dress, Give a Dress campaign is now in its tenth year. From June 1st through June 6th, every full-price dress purchased in stores or online triggers a donation of a brand-new dress to Delivering Good. It's tangible, it's timed to the summit, and it gives customers a way to participate in something bigger than a transaction.

Russo pushes the conversation into territory that goes beyond product. The Women of Impact Summit on June 3rd is about community, the kind women are actively craving, and the kind Knitwell and Delivering Good are in a position to build. A Women Behind the Brand panel, a multi-generational conversation led by Pisano's own daughter, and a full day of voices that have something real to say.

If you work in retail, social impact, or anywhere in between, this one is a good reminder of what a corporate partnership can look like when it actually means something.

What Just Happened | Justin Honaman, Global Head of Retail, Restaurants & Consumer Goods at AWS

For retailers looking to get more of an understanding of Agentic Commerce, this discussion lays it out. AWS is quickly announcing new products and if you are finding it hard to keep up, tune in. Not only will the roadmap be laid out, the strategy of what to do when you hit a road bump is discussed.

Since re:Invent in December 2025, AWS has announced Amazon Nova 2, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Quick, the expanded OpenAI partnership bringing GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 to Bedrock, Nova Act, and Kiro Autonomous Agent.

Each of these announcements represents a new frontier in what is possible for retailers and brands trying to build a better customer experience. But before any of it works, the foundation has to be right. And that foundation is data.

Honaman is direct about this. Most legacy retailers and consumer goods brands are not in a good place with their data. E-commerce data sits separate from the physical business. Systems do not talk to each other. Basic reporting is harder than it should be, let alone powering AI on top of it. The good news, he says, is that the technology is moving fast enough now to connect across data platforms and even across clouds, without requiring everything to live in one place. That dream of a single monolithic data platform is over. What matters now is access, cleanliness, and connectivity. Honaman points to platforms like Redshift, Aurora, Databricks, and Snowflake as the enterprise level tools driving this shift, and he is seeing a significant acceleration in companies moving to cloud specifically to get their data in a position where AI can actually use it.

Honaman then gets into Amazon Bedrock Agent Core, the platform that makes all of this governable at scale. This is not a separate purchase or a new subscription. If you are an AWS customer, you already have access to it. What it gives you is the guardrails, the rules of the road for how your agents operate, and the ability to move agents from development into production faster through composability. For those unfamiliar, composability means you can swap out and modify different parts of the platform without having to rebuild the whole thing. For retailers who are worried about committing to a build that could be obsolete in six months, that matters a lot. Honaman is clear that the platform is not in testing. It is live, customers are on it, and workloads are growing fast.

On trust and security, Honaman takes it back to 2006 when AWS launched and one of its founding principles was that your data is yours. Nobody at Amazon can access it. Nobody in your company can access it unless you grant them permission. That promise has not changed and everything being built on top of AWS today, including all of the agentic capabilities, carries that same security foundation. For retailers nervous about what it means to hand customer data to an AI platform, this is the answer.

Then there is the room itself. Honaman describes what is happening at AWS executive briefing centers in Seattle, New York, London, and Singapore. Every single agenda right now has AI on it. But what has shifted is who is in the room. It is no longer just the CIOs and CTOs. The CMOs, CFOs, and CEOs are showing up and they are not just listening. They are having near-technical conversations about what AI can do for their business. Honaman says a year ago that was not possible. Today it is the expectation.

Buy For Me is one of the most concrete examples of agentic commerce that Honaman walks through. If a shopper searches for a product on Amazon that is not sold on Amazon, the agent goes and finds it, navigates to the brand's website, and can complete the purchase autonomously. It is powered by Amazon Nova, Claude models from Anthropic, and runs on Amazon Bedrock. It is not a concept. It is live.

Honaman wanted to go deeper on supply chain and that is a conversation for next time.

Christine Russo sits down with Christian Muche, global president and co-founder of Possible, fresh off the conference's biggest year yet. Muche was still recovering when they recorded this, in the best possible way.

7,500 people showed up in Miami. That is not a typo. Russo and Muche get into what made this year different, from the AI verse, a brand new stage and ecosystem dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence, to the intimate peer-to-peer formats that senior CMOs keep coming back for. Muche makes a compelling case that what separates Possible from every other industry conference is not the programming. It is the intentionality behind how people actually experience it.

They also get into the thornier stuff. Walled gardens, how the industry is going to combat them, the fragmentation problem that happens when every brand and media company runs their own concurrent programming across every event on the calendar.

Then there is the news that snuck in near the end. Muche is writing a book. It is called The Future Is Possible, and if you know anything about his background, a half-Kiwi, half-German who sold the first digital banner ad in Germany in the 90s and then built a flagship US conference from scratch, you will understand why this one is going to be worth reading.

In this episode of What Just Happened, host Christine Russo sits down with Dr. Mark Grether, SVP and GM of PayPal Ads to discuss how the fintech giant is redefining the commerce media landscape.

Here is why you should tune in:

Grether explains the core differentiator of PayPal ads: the Transaction Graph. Unlike retail giants like Amazon or Walmart, which only see what you buy within their own ecosystems, PayPal leverages horizontal data from 400 million consumers and 30 million merchants globally. This provides a unique "single source of truth" for consumer behavior across the entire web.

• Precision Identity: Grether details how PayPal uses its 20-year history of fraud prevention and financial security to provide an identity layer that is significantly more accurate than standard industry players.

  
  

• The Evolving Shopping Funnel: Russo and Grether explore how the traditional path to purchase is shifting. Grether notes that consumer journeys are increasingly starting on LLMs (Large Language Models) rather than traditional search engines.

  
  

• Turning Content into Commerce: Learn about PayPal’s goal to make every digital engagement—whether on CTV, the open web, or within an LLM—a shoppable moment.

  
  

• New Announcements: Grether breaks down major new partnerships with platforms like Magnite, PubMatic, and Warner to bring curated, measurable ad campaigns to the market.

  
  

As the commerce media industry matures beyond "sponsored listings," Grether argues that the industry must join forces through standardization to survive. Whether you are a brand leader trying to justify spend to a CFO or a tech enthusiast curious about the future of AI-driven shopping, this conversation offers a roadmap for the next era of digital advertising.

What Just Happened | Episode Recap

Christine Russo sits down with Juan Hernandez Campos, COO of Happy Returns, a UPS company, to dig into one of retail's most expensive and underappreciated problems: returns. The numbers alone are staggering, and Hernandez Campos does not let you forget it.

$850 billion. That's the scale of merchandise being returned in the US, representing somewhere between 16 and 18% of total sales. Russo and Hernandez Campos get into why, despite that figure, returns still don't have their own line item on most P&Ls, and what it's going to take for the industry to treat this like the structural challenge it actually is.

But the conversation really gets interesting when Hernandez Campos pulls back the curtain on how Happy Returns is using AI to fight return fraud, specifically what he calls "decoy returns," where someone tries to pass off a cheap item for an expensive one. The system now scores every single return, flags suspicious ones, and then puts humans and AI to work side by side to make a call before the retailer ever has to issue a refund. It's a genuinely novel approach, and Hernandez Campos is candid about the internal debate they had over whether to talk about it publicly at all.

Russo pushes on all the right things: why anyone would choose reverse logistics as a business, how Happy Returns thinks about staying ahead of bad actors, and where AI fits into the future of the returns experience for shoppers.

If you work in retail ops, supply chain, or e-commerce, this one is packed with practical insight and a few surprises.

What Just Happened | Episode Recap

Christine Russo sits down with Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead, ahead of The Lead Summit this May. Gandhi gives a candid look at how she builds content for one of retail's most respected industry events, and the conversation covers a lot of ground.

Gandhi explains how the summit agenda comes together through hundreds of executive interviews conducted throughout the year. It's not about chasing trends. It's about listening to what brand leaders are actually wrestling with and then framing it in the context of what's happening right now.

AI is a big part of the program this year, but Gandhi's approach to it is refreshingly grounded. She's less interested in the hype and more focused on the real questions: How do brands show up in AI-powered search? How do leaders bring their teams along without losing people to fear or fatigue? And how do you stop your brand from becoming generic when everyone is using the same tools?

But Gandhi is just as passionate about the sessions that have nothing to do with AI. Customer acquisition, margin protection, sports marketing done right. She makes the case that the fundamentals still matter, maybe more than ever, when the environment around them is so unstable.

She also opens up about the sessions she personally loves most, including one on maintaining brand creativity when AI is pulling everything toward the middle, and another on how non-wellness brands can authentically tap into the wellness moment consumers are living in.

Russo and Gandhi also get into why in-person events still punch above their weight in an era of short-form everything. If you work in retail or brand, this one is worth your time.

What Just Happened: Recorded at Shoptalk Spring 2026

In this episode of What Just Happened, recorded live at Shoptalk, host Christine Russo sits down with Himanshu Jain, Co-Founder and Head of Product at CommerceIQ. As retail becomes increasingly algorithmic, Jain explains how brands are being left behind by manual processes while retailers use machines to determine everything from search rankings to purchase orders.

Jain breaks down the transition from static dashboards to "Agentic" commerce, where AI agents don't just provide data they execute the work. From recovering millions in hidden supply chain penalties to mastering incrementality, Jain reveals how these digital assistants are driving a 40x productivity boost for global brands.

Tune in to hear Russo and Jain discuss:

Listen now to discover how to bridge the gap between human judgment and algorithmic retail.

Why You Need to Listen: Klarna’s Evolution with Milton Pappas

In this episode of What Just Happened, creator Christine Russo sits down with Milton Pappas of Klarna to pull back the curtain on how a "buy now, pay later" pioneer evolved into a global financial juggernaut. With Klarna recently delivering its first-ever billion-dollar revenue quarter and serving 29 million consumers in the U.S. alone, the conversation dives deep into the strategy fueling this explosive growth.

Here is why you won’t want to miss this session:

Pappas shares a fascinating look at Klarna’s internal north star: The Concept of Smooth. This guiding principle is dedicated to obsessively reducing friction throughout the entire consumer journey. Pappas explains how this started with simplifying payments but quickly expanded to "smoothing" out the entire order lifecycle—from discovery and purchase to shipping tracking—keeping users engaged in the app for an average of seven minutes.

In an era where digital checkout lines are crowded with payment options, Pappas explains why Klarna is winning what he calls the "war of the buttons". He details how the company has moved "up the funnel" to become a discovery engine, positioning itself at the heart of the Intent Economy. Rather than just being a way to pay, Russo notes that Klarna now acts as a high-margin tool that drives high-intent traffic directly to retailers.

Russo and Pappas explore the different engines driving Klarna’s massive 2024 numbers, including:

Whether you are interested in the future of AI-driven shopping or the mechanics of building a global brand with 118 million loyal users, Russo and Pappas provide an essential roadmap for the next generation of commerce.

In this episode of What Just Happened, creator Christine Russo sits down with Paul Toms, the Chief Marketing Officer of Wayfair, to dissect the home retailer’s remarkable return to growth. After a challenging period, Wayfair posted a staggering $12.5 billion in sales for 2025, marking a 5.1% increase and its first return to annual growth since 2020.

Russo and Toms dive deep into the "modernization" of Wayfair’s marketing engine and the bold strategic pivots that fueled this turnaround:

Tune in to hear how Toms is navigating the "limited shelf life" of marketing trends and why he believes the upside for Wayfair’s hybrid retail future is "infinite"

Christine Russo sits down with James Hughes, Retail CTO at Verizon Business, for an onsite conversation recorded at NRF 2026, unpacking how AI, network infrastructure, and immersive technologies are actually reshaping retail operations and in-store experiences.

Hughes breaks down where AI delivers real productivity gains today, from helping store associates locate products faster to enabling immersive customer journeys like virtual try-ons and AI-powered shopping assistants. He explains why storytelling matters when selling AI internally, and why most retail innovation fails without the right connectivity layer underneath it.

The conversation dives into 5G, fixed wireless access, and edge infrastructure as practical enablers, not futuristic hype. Hughes shares real examples of how poor in-store connectivity can derail personalization, retail media activations, and computer vision deployments, and why infrastructure teams must be brought into innovation conversations much earlier.

Russo and Hughes also explore IoT, automation, and computer vision in stores, including how retailers are using data from cameras, beacons, and tags to improve conversion, staff performance, inventory visibility, and loss prevention. The episode closes with a candid look at the tension between CMOs pushing innovation and CIOs protecting core systems, and what it takes to modernize retail technology without disrupting the business.

This episode is a grounded, operator-level look at what it really takes to scale AI in retail, straight from the floor at NRF 2026.