In this episode, John Harmon, Managing Director of Technology Research at Coresight Research, discusses the upcoming Shoptalk Spring conference, highlighting the key themes that will shape retail-defining conversation among thought leaders at the event. Dive into topics such as unified commerce, brand storytelling, generative AI (artificial intelligence) and the rise of retail media, and understand how these trends will impact consumer engagement and the future of retail technology. Coresight Research is a research partner of Shoptalk Spring 2025.
Takeaways
Chapters
00:00 This Week in Research: New Reports and Data
02:25 Coresight Research's Role and Responsibilities
03:54 Key Themes of Shoptalk Spring
04:52 Unified Commerce: The Future of Retail
07:06 Brand Storytelling and Consumer Engagement
08:12 Generative AI and the Evolution of Search
10:02 Leveraging New Technologies in Retail
12:30 The Rise of Retail Media
13:49 Keynote Highlights and Conference Insights
Related research:
Welcome to Retaili$tic, the official podcast of Coresight Research for March 11, 2025. This week, Senior Technology Analyst John Harmon joins us to discuss the upcoming Shop Talk Spring Conference in Las Vegas. But first, Isla Melden from the editorial team is here to discuss the research publishing this week on Corsight.com.
Hi Isla.
Hi Philip. Firstly, as we get excited for Shop Talk Spring at the end of the month, I want to encourage listeners to download our innovator profiles of the 12 retail tech companies that will compete at the Shark Reef Startup Pitch Competition. These reports will publish a few at a time throughout this week. Coresight Research is once again a research partner of Shop Talk Spring and the Startup Pitch is always one of our highlights at this event.
This year, you'll discover innovative companies from around the world that are levelling up customer experiences and streamlining business operations in retail. The Shark Reef competitors are Big Sur AI, Leica World, Lumia AI, Nectar Social, Novel, Play Ably, Retail Ready, Selectica, ShopPeaks, ShopVision, Sotira, and Wavy Analytics. From AI to analytics to personalization and more, our profiles detail each startup solution and competitive edge so you can head to the events already in the know.
We look forward to seeing you there, where you can have your say to determine the audience choice winner and where the coveted judges choice award will be given to one lucky company. Elsewhere in research this week, we analyzed proprietary survey data to understand consumer sentiment in China amid the imposition of US tariffs. Plus, our US focused consumer survey insights report dives into economic and financial optimism among US consumers and presents new data on shopping trends in the home and home improvement retail sector.
Finally, I wanted to highlight our US CPG sales tracker, which Coresight Research produces in partnership with Circana. This series presents regular data-driven insights into total and online sales trends in the US consumer packaged goods industry, covering food and beverages, health and beauty, and general merchandise and home care departments. You can find the latest reports on coresight.com.
Thanks Isla.
And I'm delighted to have John Harmon with us this week.
It's a pleasure to be here again. Thank you.
John, before we talk about our topic of discussion this week, can you tell everyone a little bit about your roles and responsibilities at Coresight?
My title is Director of Technology Research. I manage our company's technology research efforts, which span the gamut from AI to cloud computing to in-store technology to loss prevention. I've been with Coresight since the beginning of Coresight and before that I was a retail analyst. So my expertise spans both retail and retail technology.
You have some exciting travel plans coming up.
I'm going to Las Vegas in two weeks to attend the Shop Talk Spring Conference.
That's exciting. What is Coresight going to be doing this year at Shop Talk?
Coresight is one of the official research providers for Shop Talk. We will be attending the keynotes and the sessions, also meeting with companies in the meetings that they arrange, and then having other meetings. We will also be offering some events for our clients. The result of this is that we will be publishing research reports covering the conference.
So we're kind of the live play-by-play for Shop Talk Spring.
Very much so. We will be publishing two reports a day for the three days of the conference. And a bit afterwards, we will be publishing a wrap-up report that draws everything together that we heard and saw there.
And Georgina mentioned that we have this Shop Talk Preview Guide live. So what do you think are the biggest takeaways from what we've seen so far on the Shop Talk agenda and itinerary?
Well, the overarching theme is customer centric retail. The idea that retailers need to bring their focus back on the customer and away from themselves. And to do this, retailers are leveraging AI, unified commerce, and new engagement strategies to create seamless and personalized experiences.
We've identified at Coresight Research five major themes striving this year's conference, unified commerce, brand storytelling, Next Generation AI Search, Advanced Technology for Retail Productivity, and the Evolution of Retail Media.
That's a great agenda for our PowerPoint presentation if we were giving one. So what's on slide one? What do we jump into first?
Slide one is unified commerce. Unified commerce is a more advanced evolution of omnichannel, which has been used for years and years and really just means online and offline. But unified commerce can have multiple connected channels, creating a fully integrated experience where consumers can seamlessly transition between online and offline. According to Coresight Research, over 65 % of US consumers engage with multiple shopping channels, and this number is growing. At Shop Talk, we'll see major brands like Foot Locker Coach and Mattel discuss how they're implementing unified commerce to improve customer experience and loyalty.
I remember when brands and retailers got into the online space initially and people were worried about what they called showrooming. How has unified commerce evolved and what are some of the exciting trends there?
I think showrooming is still there. Where commerce starts and stops is it's really a blurred line. Customers, consumers may look at a product in the store, buy it online, buy it online, buy it in a physical store, or really a combination of the two. And the consumer doesn't really care whether it's offline. The idea of unified commerce is that this whole journey is, as I said before, seamless for the consumer. There's no beginning, no end. It's just part of the whole shopping journey.
Yeah, I guess that puts a lot of pressure on retailers to get their data integrated and not siloed. I'm thinking specifically of if you see something online for like a buy online, pick it up in store. If your actual in-store inventory is somehow siloed from what's on your website, that can lead to a lot of customer frustration, obviously.
Well, certainly the in-store inventory has to be accurate. Exactly. There's more to it than that, A consumer could be having a service conversation with an associate online and then walk into the physical store. The associate that picks up the relationship at that point really needs to know what has happened before to offer the best service to the customer. If the associate has to ask, tell me what the problem was again, the customer will be annoyed.
That's a great point. So let's talk about the second theme you mentioned, brand storytelling and differentiation.
Well, we know that there are a lot of platforms vying for consumers' attention these days. Online, offline, TV, print, a lot of social media, including video and shoppable video. And video is immediate and compelling. retailers and brands really need to stand apart from the noise. And today's consumers expect authenticity and brands need to connect on a deeper level. There's one session at the conference that features Olaplex, SoulCycle, and Stanley 1913. And these companies are going to discuss how they're building customer loyalty through brand storytelling and niche market engagement.
That sounds like an exciting session. Should be fun. Yeah, I guess that's the beauty of these conferences is you really have an opportunity to go and see what some of the thought leaders are doing in their own stores and learn from that. The next big topic, I guess, would be gen AI and the future of search. How do you think AI is changing retail?
Well, to digress just a small bit, mean, AI in general is changing retail, one, through the ability of traditional AI, such as AI machine learning, to create accurate forecasts and find relationships among data. And generative AI takes it to another level due to its ability to handle unstructured data. Let me give you an example. It really is transforming search.
If a consumer looks for something like a little black dress on a website, those terms have to have been tagged for the website to find it. But Genitive AI can process text much more readily and understand what the customer's really looking for, even if it hasn't been programmed into the search engine. Another example is someone's looking for the dress that Beyonce wore at the Oscars after party. That information is really up to date and relevant. It's not likely to be tagged on a search engine. But Genitive AI can scour the internet and find the meaning of those terms and find the relevant product. That's called semantic search.
There are also AI-powered, generative AI-powered chatbots that can understand the context of what the customer is looking for. These technologies offer more intuitive conversational and personalized shopping experiences. At Shop Talk Spring, we'll see companies like eBay, Pinterest, and Ulta Beauty, which are at the forefront, using AI-driven search to be more interactive.
So little black dress, cocktail dress, party dress, there's gotta be a million ways to describe the same product. And it really would require AI to figure out all the different ways that language, these different words that people use are talking about the exact same thing.
So let's not forget retail tech. How are the brands leveraging new technologies?
So I hinted at this before. It's a very exciting area. Using AI for analytics, things like demand forecasting, inventory allocation, assortment allocation, that sound like really dry concepts, but they get the goods on the shelves where the customer is in the quantity that really need to be there and drive a superior customer experience.
There are other technologies like smart shelves. They can be electronic shelf labels or screens in the stores, which create better experiences. And we're still in the early stages of checkout free technologies such as Amazon Just Walkout and some other startups that use cameras rather than sensors to create a really frictionless experience for the consumer, which should increase engagement and make operations run better. At the show, we're going to see companies like Meta, Stitch Fix, and PetSmart offering insights on how their technologies are shaping the future of retail productivity.
Absolutely, and some leading edge technologies help us with this. We already have cameras for inventory monitoring on the shelf in stores, shelf edge cameras. There are companies that mount cameras on robots that cruise through the store periodically during the day and take inventory counts. They really help. Retailers keep goods on the shelves. But now with leading edge technologies like Agendic AI, the cameras can watch the shelves and when something runs out, create an agent that sends a message to someone to restock the shelf or sends a robot to restock the shelf. There are really a lot of exciting things happening in using computer vision for inventory monitoring and replenishment.
Retail media has been a really booming sector. It offers high growth and high margin revenue for retailers. It's not surprising that retailers are adopting this. We see though in-store retail media as the final frontier of this, being able to reach customers in the store. Stores certainly have had screens for a long time, but equipping the screens with intelligence so they show the right ad at the right time to the right person is very exciting.
And brands are shifting their ad dollars towards first party data driven marketing on platforms like Amazon, Walmart, TikTok and Roku, which are changing the way that retailers connect with consumers. just mentioned Roku. think CTV connected televisions are also a really exciting area, bringing retail media onto our TVs that we watch many hours a day. And of course, our research, estimate retail media to be a nearly $180 billion market this year. We will see a lot of strategies discussed at Shop Talk that will be critical for marketers moving forward.
I'd start with the keynotes because they bring leaders in the retail industry to talk about what they're thinking about, what their concerns and plans are. For example, on the Tuesday of the show, we'll hear from GAP CEO Richard Dixon, who's going to talk about how GAP is evolving in a unified commerce world.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, our Coresight Research CEO Deborah Weinswig will emcee the Shark Reef Startup Pitch Competition, where early stage innovators are showcasing cutting edge retail solutions. What's different this year is normally the pitch competition was on the first day of the conference, but now it's been split into two sections on the Tuesday and the Wednesday of Shop Talk, as I mentioned.
And finally, the keynote on Thursday is offered by Google's Sean Scott on customer centricity, one of the major themes in digital commerce. We're also planning to attend a lot of great sessions on loyalty programs, personalization, the future of social commerce, and planning to see executives from Shein, DoorDash, and Tractor Supply.
Well, just as Shop Talk Spring 2025 is a must attend conference for anyone in retail, the trends we see at the conference every year are at the leading edge of retail and they'll shape the industry for the next decade. Core Site Research will be there attending the sessions and we will be providing live coverage and daily reports throughout the event.
The Corsight team will be there attending the sessions. As I mentioned, our CEO, Deborah Weinstein, will be emceeing the Shark Tank startup competition.