MARCH 2026
MARCH 2026
Managing Editor: John Mathews
Senior Writer: Stephanie Kreml
Writers: Mary Alison, Allison Gillchrist,
Kim Langdon Cull, Connie Yerbic, Elena Borrelli
Magazine Designer : Michelle Wong
Digital Publishing Director: John Louis
Advertising: David Miller
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The show drew its usual congregation of the curious, the committed, and the competitive — 40,000 attendees and a floor crackling with the energy of a sector being reshaped faster than it can absorb. The word of the week was agentic. The feeling underneath was something more honest: urgency.
The AI story at NRF 2026 was not about the technology. It was about the gap between retailers who have built the foundation to use it and those still building it. Fifty-two percent of global shoppers want a personal AI to shop on their behalf. Sixty-one percent of businesses admit their infrastructure cannot support those ambitions. That gap — between consumer expectation and enterprise capability — ran like a fault line beneath every session.
What emerged was a practical architecture for closing it: fix the data first, define your vocabulary before deploying your models, and trust the agent enough to act on its answer — or you have built a very expensive recommendation you will override.
The sessions deliver the proof. Eighty percent of Dick's Sporting Goods' online orders fulfilled from stores. A 233% lift on a product dismissed as a slow mover. A Kroger bakery doing inventory in minutes rather than ninety. A returns process that turned a cost center into $22 of incremental revenue. A criminal drone fleet tracking a paintball-marked freight car — and the science deployed to stop it.
These are not pilot results. They are production outcomes from retailers who committed to the work. This edition captures those conversations in full. Read them as a map of what is now possible — and as a prompt for what your organization should be doing next.
NRF 2026 was the year retail stopped asking whether AI would arrive and started asking who would be ready.
Happy reading.
John Mathews
editor@retail-today.com
NRF 2026: Ready or Not, the Agent Is at the Door