Retail's Tech Problem Isn’t Invention. It's Mastery.
My Amazon co-author, Miya Knights, joins me on the pod. And she has a new book!
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Shoptalk Europe - an intense but incredible 48 hours in Barcelona!
I recorded 8 Retail Disrupted interviews with retail leaders, Shoptalk speakers, and industry experts so, if you haven’t already, now is a good time to subscribe to our YouTube channel. So much content heading your way.
First up is Miya Knights, publisher of Retail Technology Magazine. Miya is my co-author on Amazon and she has a brand new book coming out this Sept!
On today’s episode, she tells us how retailers can get started with AI. First and foremost, get the basics right - clean data, structured product information, a clear view of customer needs, missions and journeys. The unglamorous infrastructure that makes the clever stuff actually work.
“Agents are still at such a nascent stage that we haven’t got the protocols, the standards, the guardrails, the playbooks in place in terms of how that handoff is going to work. I was on a call with a bunch of retailers last week and one actually said: ‘What if we all just bunch together and refuse?’ And I had to remind them - 25 years ago you were throttling mobile signals in stores. This is the direction of travel. You’ve got to be where the customer is.” - Miya Knights
A few tensions we got into:
→ Agentic commerce is coming for the checkout - but Miya says we're not there yet. When an AI agent eventually does the buying, who owns that customer relationship — the retailer or the platform?
→ The "answer engine" shift. If LLMs are increasingly the front door to discovery, your entire digital presence becomes a search surface. Get the fundamentals wrong and you're invisible — no amount of AI spend fixes that.
→ AI slop – are we leaning on AI too much for content creation and what do retailers need to know about the EU AI Act (coming in August)?
📣 📖 Miya’s new book: “The Future of Shopping: Using Digital, Data and AI to Win with Customers” is out in Sept! Pre-order here!
Live recordings are always more interesting, though subject to unexpected cameos and some extra noise 😅 Available on YouTube now and coming to Apple Podcasts and Spotify later today.