AI in retail

In Conversation: Neela Montgomery, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize

23 October 2026

The K-shaped consumer, and why growth now lives at the store level

Neela Montgomery, Senior Advisor / Board Director, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

The top 10 percent of American shoppers are now driving half the sales. That is the number Neela Montgomery keeps in front of her boards, and it reframes what growth even means. If you serve the strained consumer, she says, you are “having to trade every transaction.” If you serve the premium end, you are fine. The middle is where the pain lives.

Montgomery sits as a board director and senior advisor across Alix Partners, Logitech and Ahold Delhaize, with a past life running Crate and Barrel and CVS and cutting her teeth at Tesco. She has seen the machinery from the inside.

Her read on where the levers actually sit is the useful part. Not autonomy for store managers, but intelligence pushed out to them: central data ingested by AI, then handed to the furniture seller at Crate and Barrel as a personalised solution so they can do what they are good at, which is selling. On AI itself she is blunt · the experimentation phase is over. One 16-year company veteran, pointed at the customer software with unlimited access to a coding tool, found 280 points of failure and the machine fixed 60 on its own. That is the power: speed to clear historical tech debt.

Then there is GLP-1. Ten to twelve percent of Americans now on the drugs, smaller clothing sizes, less volume through grocery, and a scramble towards protein and fibre. A killer for some categories, a premiumisation story for others.

What matters for you is that every one of these shocks has a shape you can trade against, if you can see your customer at a granular enough level. Most retailers still cannot.

The Roth Read. If half your sales come from a tenth of your shoppers, you do not have a marketing budget problem, you have a targeting problem. Stop spending to acquire people without the spending power, and start pushing your best intelligence to the person on the shop floor. The winners this cycle will be the ones who trade every transaction on purpose.

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.

In Conversation: Jon Stine, Honeycomb Retail AI

16 October 2026

The Tsunami Is Coming, and You Cannot Tell the Water to Go Away

Jon Stine, Fellow, Honeycomb Retail AI · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Not a wave. Not a tidal wave. A tsunami that changes everything, and the first waters are already reaching the shore.

Jon Stine has spent a career at the meeting point of retail and technology, working with and for Intel and many of the world’s top technology companies, and he now sits as a Fellow at Honeycomb Retail AI. He came to Berlin to watch the water come in.

Two things he said are worth carrying home. The first is about where the value actually lands. The glamour is on the front end, the content, the agentic search, the brand showing up inside a large language model. But the money, Stine argues, is round the back: “the vast majority of the value will come from the use of agents to transform, recreate, re-architect business processes.” His method is unfashionably disciplined. Do not throw AI at a pain point and hope. Start with an operational metric. Replenishment that took two days from recognition to order, can you take it to sixteen hours, or eight, or four? Find the marginal basis points, then let them compound.

The second is speed, and here he is blunt. The differentiator will be the ability to know sooner, decide smarter and act faster than your competition. Not because speed is a virtue in itself, but because the shopper already knows sooner. The AI natives are in primary consumption spaces now, and their expectations only rise.

For a brand owner, the warning is precise. Your brand strength is what a large language model reaches for, but your operations are what let you keep the promise it makes.

The Roth Read. Stop asking what AI can do and start asking which decision you make too slowly. Name the metric, cut the hours, let the basis points compound. The shopper already knows sooner than you do.

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.

In Conversation: Parag Parekh, Ingka Group | IKEA

9 October 2026

The Shopper No Longer Wants a Bed. They Want Better Sleep.

Parag Parekh, Chief Digital Officer, Ingka Group | IKEA · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Customers have stopped asking for a bed. They are asking for better sleep. They have stopped asking for a sofa. They are asking someone to help set up the living room. That shift, small in words, enormous in consequence, is the one Parag Parekh kept returning to.

Parekh is Chief Digital Officer of Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, steering a digital operation he describes as six or seven years young inside an 80 year old business. Late to digital, and he says so plainly.

What he does not do is pretend the playground is infinite. When product teams had autonomy and agility but no clear business owner and no idea whether a project sat in the top ten or top thirty priorities, IKEA built a retail investment council to rank and stack every request against top line or cost. Discipline, not enthusiasm. He is candid about what is not cracked: warehouse software still running on Pascal from the 1980s, creative production still largely outsourced, HR and finance foundations unbuilt. The wins are specific. A customer service chatbot, Billy, absorbs repetitive intents so co-workers can be moved to room design sessions that were rationed by cost per room. Free the hours, democratise the service.

Here is what a brand owner should take. Parekh anchors every digital decision to what IKEA means: trust, comfort, a data promise made before a single digital product shipped. The technologist guards the brand, not the marketing department alone.

The Roth Read. If agentic commerce means shoppers describe a room and not a product, then your catalogue is no longer the asset · the solution is. Ask yourself whether an agent, given a messy hallway, would surface your brand or route straight past it. The retailers who win this dance are the ones whose trust transfers into the machine, and IKEA started building that promise before it built the ecosystem.

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.

In Conversation: Nail Valley, Youzu

2 October 2026

Most Retailers Are Bolting AI On. The Real Work Sits in the Catalogue

Nail Valley, Co-founder, Youzu · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Ask most e-commerce leaders about AI and they will point you to a shopping assistant plugged in through an API. Nail Valley thinks that is the easy trick, and the wrong place to start. The real work sits underneath, in the catalogue nobody has bothered to understand.

Nail is co-founder of Youzu, which he describes as an “intelligence layer for e-commerces and marketplaces.” His argument is that most sites talk about adoption while doing the shallow version: “just, you know, kind of using API solutions that’s connecting to LLMs, which is quite simplistic.”

His case has two floors. The foundation is product data, catalogues and SKUs, enriched and normalised by embedding both text and visual data so the machine actually understands what is on the shelf. On top of that sits visual AI: computer vision models that let a shopper search by image, a Google Lens experience most retailers have seen at the big platforms and almost none can offer themselves. “99% of e-commerce do not have that.” He is candid, too, about what is coming: AI-generated content so realistic that within a year or two you will struggle to tell it from a photograph, with humans left to moderate rather than make.

Here is my read. The seductive part of AI is the shopper-facing layer, the chat window, the clever demo. The unglamorous part is knowing your own images and video well enough that a machine can too. One is a feature. The other is a foundation. Skip the foundation and the feature sits on sand.

The Roth Read. Before you buy another shopping assistant, ask a harder question: does your business actually understand its own catalogue, image by image? If the answer is no, you are decorating a house with no floor. Nail’s five-year warning is blunt, and you should take it as a deadline, not a mood.

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.

In Conversation: Steph McGovern

18 September 2026

You Will Not Be Replaced by AI · You Will Be Replaced by Someone Who Uses It

Steph McGovern, Broadcaster and Presenter · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Business as usual is over. What we have now, Steph McGovern told the room on the first morning in Berlin, is business as unusual, and we have simply got used to it.

McGovern is a broadcaster and journalist who now also runs a retail business of her own, Gootopia, a slime and experience venture that grew from six units to fifteen in a year. She is not talking about retail from the stalls. She is on the pitch.

Her read on the day was sharp. Homogeneity is a death sentence: “if you’re homogeneous you’re not going to survive.” The customer is now dictating, not being told. And the thing that holds it all together is not agility for its own sake but storytelling anchored to truth, whether you are Tendam’s Juan describing a tsunami rather than a wave, or Zalando’s David Schneider recalling flip-flops sold from a basement twenty years before the platform reached sixty million customers. On AI she was refreshingly unmystical. She uses it to trace a sales dip to the exact moment a new hire started, to write bedtime stories with a witch’s dragon from next door, and she has her elderly neighbour on Claude booking hospital taxis. Find your problem first, she says, then use the tool. Do not use it for the sake of it.

What matters here for any brand owner is the reframing of AI as an enabler of humanity, not a replacement for it. People are never offline, so they crave the analogue. Slime and dine. Something to touch.

The Roth Read. McGovern’s warning is the one to pin above your desk: you will not be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by someone who uses it. Stop admiring the technology and start naming the problem it solves for your customer. If you cannot, someone hungrier already has.

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.

In Conversation: South African Team, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa

11 September 2026

The Generation Built for AI Would Rather You Kept the Waiter

South African Team, Future Retail Challenge 2026 Winners, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Ask the people who will spend their whole careers alongside AI what they would build with it, and they answer by protecting the thing it could most easily replace. The human moment. That was the striking turn in this conversation with the winning student team.

They are from the University of Cape Town, one of twenty-one guests I sat down with in Berlin and, as it turned out, this year’s Future Retail Challenge winners. The brief: reimagine the store in 2030, when AI has been woven through our lives. Their case was Spur, a South African restaurant chain known for family-centred experiences.

What they did with it matters more than the win. Faced with a mandate to automate, they refused to let automation take the stage. “It was important for us to fight for the family experiences,” one of them told me, arguing that AI should step behind the human interaction rather than in front of it. On the question that keeps the older half of this Congress awake, jobs, they were clear-eyed rather than starry-eyed: AI viewed “in a very positive light,” but only if used responsibly, there “to create more time and space for humans to actually really connect in a more meaningful way.” And a warning, delivered with a calm most boardrooms lack: do not relinquish all of your responsibilities to automation.

Here is what a retailer should take from a room full of twenty-somethings. The generation you assume will automate everything is the one telling you not to. They see the shelf, the table, the greeting as the point, and the technology as the servant.

The Roth Read. If your 2030 plan uses AI to remove people, you are solving the wrong problem, and your youngest customers already know it. Automate the queue, not the welcome. Ask which human moment your technology is meant to protect, and if you cannot name one, start again.

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.