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.