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.