AI Can Do the Task. It Cannot Read the Room.
Katherine Melchior Ray, President / Professor, Globe Ally / Berkeley Haas · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.
Every session in Berlin mentioned AI. Only one asked what it cannot do. In a room busy with acceleration, Katherine Melchior Ray turned the conversation to the thing left over when the machine has done its work: the feeling.
Katherine is President of Globe Ally and teaches at Berkeley Haas. She built her brand career at Shiseido, Louis Vuitton, Nike and Nordstrom, and wrote a book on the tension every global retailer lives with, the balance between being one brand everywhere and a different brand in each market.
Her argument starts with a claim worth pausing on: “values are universal,” but how those values are personified differs from one market to the next. AI, she says, cannot bridge that gap, because “AI doesn’t get context. And culture is context.” She reaches for the iceberg: we see the clothes, the cinema, the language, but the expectations and behaviours sit under the waterline, unspoken, and a model cannot read what nobody thought to tell it. Then the sharper point. AI cannot read a face. Someone likes your comment online · do they really like it, or are they doing it for peer pressure? The signal a retailer most wants, genuine connection, is precisely the one the machine cannot verify.
Her read for retailers is not defensive. Let AI take the mechanical work, so people are freed to do the human thing: make a customer feel seen, valued and heard. She quotes Mindy Grossman on AI ushering in a “new human renaissance,” and means it.
The test for your brand is whether you use the time AI gives you to connect, or simply to do more tasks faster.
The Roth Read. If AI handles the mechanical and everyone gets that for free, your only remaining advantage is the part it cannot fake: human connection in a specific culture. Ask what your people now have time to do that a model never will. If the answer is nothing, you have automated your way to sameness.
David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.