Stop Panicking and Start Building: Real-World AI Lessons from Shoptalk Spring 2026

Shoptalk Spring 2026 delivered. Three days of sessions, debates, and conversations that made it very clear: retail AI has moved out of the strategy deck and into the store. 

The Retail AI Council was on the ground specifically to track what our members and their peers are actually building right now. And what came through, particularly from our members Andy Laudato, Ekta Chopra, and Rebecca Maffei, was the kind of practical, on-the-ground perspective that retail leaders need right now. 

We moved from “should we?” to “how fast?” Overnight. 

Andy Laudato, COO of The Vitamin Shoppe, said something at the conference that landed: “None of us are behind on AI because even if you think you’re ahead, it’s gonna change anyway. So we’re all in the same place.” 

That’s not resignation. That’s permission to stop panicking and start building. 

The general vibe at Shoptalk 2026 was that agentic commerce stopped being a thought experiment. Retailers aren’t debating whether AI will influence transactions. They’re figuring out channel strategy, pricing, data licensing, and brand positioning for a world where it already does. The question shifted from “is this real?” to “are we ready?” 

Most aren’t. But the interesting ones are moving anyway.

Andy Laudato’s radical idea: use AI to be less robotic. 

Andy’s whole thesis was that AI, done right, doesn’t make retail feel more automated. It makes retail feel more personal. He literally referenced Andy Griffith. Those little country stores where people walked in and the owner knew their name, knew what they liked, and stocked something just for them. The Vitamin Shoppe has 650 locations across the United States. The idea that AI could make each of those stores feel like your neighborhood shop is the actual ambition. 

Here’s what they’re actually doing to get there: 

• Their associates (they call them health enthusiasts, which tells you something about their culture) start every shift by answering one or two personalized training questions through a gamified platform called Exonify. The AI calibrates to where each person actually is in their product knowledge, not where the training manual assumes they are. A first-week hire gets the basics. Someone who’s been there for years gets pushed on whatever’s new. “Taking AI and making it one on one education has really been a game-changer,” Andy said. 
  

• The obsession with keeping associates physically present with customers runs through everything they’re building. When someone walks in and shares their phone number, associates can pull up that customer’s history, loyalty points, and past purchases right there on the floor. No disappearing into the back to look something up. No leaving someone standing alone. “The worst thing that can happen,” Andy said, “is that the associate leaves that person and walks away for 5 or 10 minutes to handle something and then comes back and that customer just feels a little lonely in that process.” AI is what makes that absence unnecessary. 
  

• On personalization, Andy described the evolution from “20% off, everyone gets it” to segmented offers to something genuinely individual. Not just a discount. A workout recommendation if you bought sports nutrition. An apology if you had a bad experience. Offers built around who you actually are as a customer. 

  
  

If your AI strategy is still mostly about the back office, these examples are worth sitting with. The front-of-store opportunity might actually be bigger. 

Ekta Chopra’s message: slow down on commitment, speed up on learning. 

Ekta Chopra brought ELF Beauty’s perspective to the debate stage, and she had one of the most grounded takes of the conference. In a room full of projections and predictions, she pushed retailers to focus on education and testing AI tools before locking in big commitments. 

The session (framed as “AI Agents Will / Will Not Transform Retail”) went deep on discovery, personalization, and retail media. Ekta’s position throughout was consistent: AI’s job is to complement human expertise and enrich customer experiences, not to paper over the things that make a brand worth trusting in the first place. Authenticity isn’t a soft concern. It’s the whole business. 

On a related panel, Kevin Harwood from Tecovas put the content risk in blunt terms: the trap right now is generating “AI slop,” more and more content with all the signals that scream AI-written and none of the brand voice that makes customers actually trust you. Ekta’s education-first stance and Kevin’s content warning land in the same place. Know what you’re building before you build more of it. 

Don’t reassign your retail media budget based on projections that haven’t played out yet in your specific category. Know how your customer is actually starting their shopping journey. That’s where the strategy has to begin. 

Rebecca Maffei had the most underrated take of the conference. 

FASHIONPHILE operates in luxury resale, which means every decision carries brand, legal, and trust implications that most retailers don’t deal with at the same intensity. So when Rebecca Maffei talks about AI governance, she’s not talking theoretically. 

The key phrase is “the right level.” Not maximum governance. Not minimum. Governance that’s sized to actually move with you. 

Most retail organizations still treat governance like a legal department problem. It shows up as a review process, a checkbox, and a brake on the engineers. What Rebecca is describing is something different: governance as the thing that makes it possible to move fast without blowing up your brand, your customer trust, or your legal exposure in the process. 

The session covered the full range of what can go wrong when you move without a plan: security vulnerabilities, unpredictable costs, customer backlash, and workforce disruption. These aren’t theoretical. They’re things that have already happened to brands that moved without a framework. The retailers doing it right built the infrastructure first, then accelerated. 

If you don’t have a real AI governance framework (not a policy doc, but a framework with actual accountability built in), that’s the conversation to start now. 

The part nobody put on a slide but everyone was saying. 

Andy, Ekta, and Rebecca came at this from completely different contexts. Specialty health retail. Beauty. Luxury resale. But they kept landing in the same place. 

AI that works in retail makes the people in it better at their jobs and customers better served. The moment it starts replacing human judgment, authentic brand voice, or the actual connection happening between an associate and a customer, you’ve missed the point. 

That sounds obvious until you’re in a budget meeting trying to justify a governance team or a slower content rollout. That’s when the pressure to just move starts winning. All three of them were saying the same thing: don’t let it. 

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