Hi friends,
I’m back home, finally unpacked, and still feeling that slightly dazed post-NRF whiplash. If you feel FOMO for not attending, let me just tell you that I was there and I still feel like I missed out on many critical moments.
This week’s digest is a mix of those hallway moments, a couple of stages I was lucky enough to be on, and one or two places I kicked myself for not being in the room.
How Retailers Are Building For Agentic Commerce
In a packed session, journalist Jason Del Rey asked the room two questions: who uses AI for shopping research (most hands up) and who would trust AI to complete the transaction (about half as many). That visual captured the “agentic commerce” trust gap perfectly. Retail leaders from Home Depot, Wayfair, and PayPal framed this not as a wait‑and‑see bet, but as the next evolution of search: build the infrastructure now, before the behavior fully catches up. Read the full post
Breakfast for dinner (Mirakl dinner recap)
Over “breakfast for dinner,” Mirakl Ads brought together retail media leaders from Costco, H‑E‑B, CVS, Ace Hardware, Farmacias del Ahorro, and Lowe’s. The conversation centered on the messy reality of in‑store retail media: operational friction, build‑vs‑buy temptations, agile next‑gen vendors, and the increasingly blended customer journey that starts on mobile and ends in‑store. It was a grounded, tactical counterpoint to the hype.
Read my quick recap on Linkedin, but I’ll also be sharing a deeper dive on the themes next week in my daily newsletter (Subscribe here)
Costco’s radical transparency on RMN tech stack
Costco’s AVP of retail media, Mark Williamson, did something you almost never see: put his entire retail media tech stack on a slide for a room full of competitors and analysts.Phones went up immediately. In my piece this week for The Drum, I unpack why that level of transparency is so unusual, what it signals about Costco’s strategy, and why secrecy around RMN infrastructure might be more liability than advantage.
Macy’s + Amazon RAS: letting the fox into the hen‑house?
Another NRF standout: Macy’s partnership with Amazon’s Retail Ads Service, which some viewed as “a deal with the devil.” Michael J. Krans walked through why he sees it instead as smart co‑opetition—removing friction for buyers, tapping into existing Amazon workflows, and activating long‑tail advertisers without ballooning headcount. It’s a useful case study in when collaborating with a competitor actually grows the pie. Read here.
Uncertainty, UCP, and the fear of missing the moment
In my first RMBC newsletter of 2026, I wrote about accidentally walking out of the room right before Sundar Pichai announced Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) on the NRF main stage — and the jolt of “did I just miss the thing?” that followed. Thursday’s newsletter/blog explores uncertainty, what UCP might mean for agentic commerce, and, to keep us human, a few of my favorite novels from 2025.
At NRF, Retailers Say “Bring On All The Bots”
For a decade, retailers fought to keep bots off their websites. But at NRF I discovered that major retailers are racing to welcome AI shopping agents. “We’ve spent the last decade saying, ‘no bots on our site,’” Rob Frieman, CIO of URBN, told Stripe’s chief revenue officer of AI at the National Retail Federation conference this week. “Now we’re saying the opposite. We’re saying, ‘bring on all the bots, buy all the things.’”
But welcome them to do what, exactly? And how fast? In my column for The Drum I share what six major U.S. retailers said about their agentic commerce strategies—and more importantly, what they’re actually building.
The Retail Media Celebrity Death Match (yes, I kept the trophy)
I couldn’t resist a post‑NRF debrief on our Retail Media Celebrity Death Match — including a tongue‑in‑cheek recap of a few things I “didn’t mean” to say about the industry and my fellow contestants. Underneath the roast format, there’s a real point: sometimes the only way to address uncomfortable truths about retail media is to go straight through them with humor.
“Yes, if…” instead of “No, because”
From the NRF main stage, Ed Stack, executive chairman of DICK’S Sporting Goods, shared a simple meeting rule: you’re not allowed to respond to an idea with “no, because…” — only “yes, if…”
It sounds small, but it fundamentally shifts organizations from gatekeeping to possibility‑finding, which is exactly the kind of posture retailers need as AI and agentic commerce reshape the landscape. Read here.
That’s it for this week (phew!)
Catch you next week.
