A few years ago, AI began to dazzle us. The speed and the possibilities made us feel like kids looking up at the night sky under a fireworks show. We weren’t sure how this all worked, how it would affect stores, teams, and customers, or if we should be scared, but we couldn’t look away.
The technology is a bullet train. Where it was going, we weren’t sure. But we wanted to talk about it—a lot. Faster than I thought possible, companies began to talk about missing out. FOMO is very much alive in business, and if you weren’t already invested, you were missing out.
That’s what they said. They said your business would fail if you didn’t get in right now. No pressure.
As I walked through the doors of the Javits Center in New York City to attend NRF’s Big Show, I was curious. Would AI still remain the top dog of conversation? Would there be a replacement? Or would the dazzle finally give way to something more concrete?
Agentic Commerce
As an industry, we’re finally moving past AI experiments and buzzwords toward real use cases. This year at NRF, one stood out above the rest: agentic commerce. It’s important, and it’s currently exploding.
What is “agentic” exactly? Good question because it’s a bit complex.
Agentic commerce is the next phase of ecommerce. Autonomous AI agents act on behalf of humans to complete complex, multi-step online shopping. For example, say you’re looking for a new tea kettle. You want it to be under $100, pistachio green, and have quality reviews.
Next, the AI agent searches the internet, scans reviews, matches the color, and brings back the top three options for you. If you decide to buy, you can easily check out and have your new kettle shipped to you before you finish eating your avocado toast.
Like magic.
Consumers no longer need to spend time browsing, comparing, and reading reviews. They’re assigning a task to the AI and having it carry it out on their behalf. This isn’t just convenience; it’s delegation.
Many consumers are already using agentic commerce through AI-powered search summaries, recommendation engines, and automated checkout flows; they just don’t know there’s a name for it.
This next step in ecommerce feels intuitive. AI was integrated into our computers and our phones early on. We got used to AI summaries hovering at the top of our web searches. Agentic commerce feels familiar and is a natural extension of how we shop online. It’s gaining momentum. Shopify reports a 14x increase in orders sourced from AI agents.
Younger generations shopping online today will know no other way. The rise of the agentic commerce-native shopper is on the horizon, and retailers need to prepare for it.
But what about stores? Like I’d leave that out. Let’s talk about it.
What “Removing Friction” Really Means
This is the retail tech companies’ favorite phrase. Removing friction. I saw it everywhere.
NRF hosts two floors of vendor booths. From the fifth floor of the convention center, it took me almost 20 minutes to get to the other end of the first floor. It’s that big. Every tech solution that works with customers “removes friction.” I’m not dogging that term. It’s important. But it’s also the buzziest buzzword coming out of NRF 2026. It began a couple of years ago, and it’s about to reach peak buzz.
AI helps stores remove friction by getting store associates more pertinent information faster. It collapses the distance between questions and answers. It’s a real drag when you’re helping a customer but you’re tasked with weeding through page after page of information that is close to what you’re looking for but not quite.
Wasting time is friction. Looking for answers in the wrong place is friction. Needing permission, escalation, or approval for routine decisions is friction.
Dedicated store teams are resourceful, but where information is stored doesn’t always make sense. Or it gets updated or moved. The more streamlined your store is, the more money you make. That’s what removing friction is all about.
“The problem [in stores] isn’t effort. It’s scalability,” says Melissa Wong, CEO & Co-Founder, Zipline. One hundred percent. This is the core constraint AI is finally addressing. A human person can only do so much. They can only search so hard. AI is streamlining store operations to a degree I thought was impossible five years ago.
Evolving Frontline Teams
For store associates, time is one of our greatest currencies. We never have enough. We are working with a task list that never ends. Priorities change every hour. We never know who will walk through our doors or what their needs will be.
Before AI, the only way we could get good at meeting all those needs was racking up hours on a store floor. Experience was earned through repetition, not enablement. When you sell side by side with your store leader, you learn a lot. But that can be a rarity. Store leaders are stretched thin. They’re typically sprinting to put out one fire after another or sending another business recap to HQ that no one will read.
With AI, we get back more of our scarcest resource: time.
We can now equip our frontline teams with all the answers they need to do their jobs. All those answers lie in their hands whenever they need them. No more, “Let me ask.” No more, “Let me find my manager. Oh, she’s on the phone. Does anyone know … ?” With AI embedded in store tools, we get back time by eliminating the ask, wait, and escalate game.
Type in your question and get the answer.
We save time. We’re able to help our customers on the spot. We learn along the way. We don’t have to wait for anyone else to come over. With AI embedded in store tech, we’re able to scale in a way that was never possible before.
Store teams can now focus on the customer experience because they’re not rooting around for answers. The answers are there whenever associates need them. This is an evolution for store teams in a profound way: from manager-dependent to self-empowered.
Which is super rad. So, what now?
The Use Case for AI in Stores is Here
I’ll be honest, even at last year’s NRF I was rolling my eyes at every mention of AI. People were stuffing it into every talk and slapping it on every booth. Every vendor was trying to make AI their thing even if it wasn’t. I wondered where it would lead us because dazzle is nice, but dazzle isn’t usually a use case.
This year, we hit a different stride. This year, we have a use case.
Agentic commerce is already racing. It’s showing strong signs of adoption by platforms, merchants, and consumers. It won’t be long before we see the rise of the agentic commerce-native shopper. This shift is happening now.
For store teams, AI is removing friction. It’s scanning, compiling, and delivering information to us faster than any human ever could. We’re no longer looking in the wrong place for information because we only need to look in one place. That alone would have saved me hundreds of hours in a retail store.
NRF’s Big Show is always enlightening. I love retail, and the Big Show is food for my brain. The people I meet there push me to keep writing and advocating for stores. It’s a highlight of my year.
NRF 2026 also marked the moment AI stopped being a retail buzzword and became retail reality. The winners won’t be the companies with the flashiest demos — they’ll be the ones who use AI to scale judgment, not just automate tasks. And for the first time, that future feels not just possible, but already underway.
I can’t wait to see what happens next.
About Kit Campoy
Kit Campoy is a retail expert and author of the book, The Retail Leader’s Field Guide. She spent 46,000 hours in stores leading teams. Today, she trains frontline teams and writes for world-class SaaS retail tech brands.
