NRF 2026 New York: those few days early in the year where you don’t have to worry about Dry January just yet. And of course, you have the global retail industry under one roof. As you might have guessed, AI was undeniable.
People were selling me the weirdest stuff that AI could solve. Sure, I see the added value of AI in my store, AI on the internet, AI for data, AI for finance, and AI for customer service. The general message was: give it to an AI, and it will magically solve all of your problems. But the most striking thing to me at NRF was the deafening silence around best-of-breed vs. Unified Commerce.
I can only imagine the anxiety a retailer must feel enabling agentic features while dealing with a legacy best-of-breed software landscape. What is the plan? Feeding the future with CSV files and hoping there is an appetite for XML files? No, anyone in their right mind is now convinced that an API-led unified retail platform is the only way forward.
Unified Commerce is no longer the revolution; it has become a hygiene factor. That was the untold retail trend of NRF 2026.
