The Retail Razor Show Podcast

The New Thing Gap - What retail took away when it took away the friction, with NYT editor Eric Athas. In 1995, buying a pair of sneakers cost you 30 minutes and five miles of driving. Today it takes about four seconds. New York Times editor Eric Athas spent four years reporting on what that trade did to people, and he has a name for the thing retail deleted: the new thing gap. Eric's book, Saying No to New, is out now. He interviewed Ricardo in 2024 for the consumer research behind it, and Ricardo shows up on page 41 explaining why off-price stores keep shipping in fresh inventory to keep shoppers hunting. This episode puts that quote back in front of the industry that inspired it. Ricardo and Casey take Eric through the uncomfortable version of the question. If the gap between wanting something and owning it was where the customer used to think, what happens to shoppers now that frictionless shopping has closed it? And what happens when agentic commerce deletes the last click? Eric's answer about AI shopping assistants is the line that sticks: we may have built the perfect motivated reasoning machine. This is not an anti-retail hour. Eric says plainly that the goal was never to say no to every new thing. He walks through the Iron Man method for deciding what to let in, the case for useful friction, why Ed O'Brien's research shows we are wrong about familiar things in a predictable direction, and the curb cut test that separates real innovation from innovation theater. Casey pushes him on whether there is a business on the other side of this, built on rediscovery instead of replacement. If you are building for agentic commerce this year or defending a frictionless shopping roadmap to someone who signs the checks, this hour will give you better questions than the ones you walked in with. In This Episode, You'll Learn. • Why the distance between seeing something new and owning it collapsed from 30 minutes and five miles to about four seconds, and what the industry removed along with it • Where useful friction belongs, plus the audit Eric uses to find the access points worth slowing down • Who an agentic commerce agent is optimizing for: the shopper, the retailer, or the company that built the agent • Why an AI shopping assistant that agrees with you is the magic pill effect with a bigger engine • The Iron Man method in three steps: name what matters, refuse what conflicts with it, accept what supports it • What Ed O'Brien's repeat-experience research means for brands that want to sell quality instead of replacement • How the Diderot effect turns one new desk into a new dining table, and what retailers owe people on the failure side of a purchase • The curb cut test for telling genuine innovation from innovation theater, and why Eric changed his mind about AI glasses • Ricardo's story about the UK retailer that cut buyer's-remorse returns in half by asking better questions at the shelf, and why frictionless shopping in reverse is the part retail keeps skipping Support our sponsors. There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival next week. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment. Late registration is available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.We’ll see you in Huntington Beach! W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations. Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off. Subscribe & Follow. How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube Featured guest. Eric Athas. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericathas/ Deputy Editor, Newsroom Development & Support. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com “Saying No to New: Why New Things Are Stealing Your Time, Money, and Happiness―and How to Take Back Your Life.”https://sayingnotonew.com Eric Athas is an editor at the New York Times, where he helps journalists learn new tools and skills they can use to tell stories. Before joining the Times in 2016, he worked at NPR and the Washington Post. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and the Nieman Journalism Lab. Athas lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn. Chapters. 00:00 Teaser 00:43 Show Intro 05:30 Welcome to the Retail Razor Show, Eric Athas! 06:25 The Painter's Lie: Why We Believe New Is Always Better 09:14 When Does Upgrading Stop Feeling Like a Win? 13:50 The Beetle Trap: Why Our Brains Are Wired for Novelty 16:50 How Retailers Engineer You Into Buying More 22:10 The Vanishing Gap Between Wanting and Buying 33:38 The Magic Pill Effect: Why AI Tells You What You Want to Hear 41:04 The Iron Man Method: Finding Your Anchor in a World of New 45:05 Rediscovering the Familiar: Why Old Things Still Work 58:03 The Diderot Effect: How One New Purchase Ruins Everything Else 01:04:11 The Curb Cut Test: How to Know What's Worth Saying Yes To 01:12:21 Show Close Meet your hosts. Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech: Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also awarded him an Elite Expert Certification in Retail, a Master Expert Certification in Management, and named him a Certified Expert in AI, Marketing, and Digital Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft. Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Episode Music. Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

The rise, death, and return of in-store retail media as lived by Mike Hiatt. Around 2010, the in-store retail media screens inside Walmart's stores were bringing in more revenue than Walmart.com. By 2015 the network was gone. Mike Hiatt, Founder & President of Dynamic Retailing, built it. He came to Bentonville to take over Walmart TV, which at the time meant 27-inch screens bolted up in the rafters playing audio that fought with Walmart Radio and lost. He rebuilt it as the Smart Network: eye-level screens, category channels, and five media endcaps that sold out every time they went to market. At its peak it had the reach of a Super Bowl each week. It was a retail media network before the industry coined the phrase. Then it came apart. Marketing owned the network, merchants owned the space, and nobody had built a way to cut the merchants in. Walmart pulled it out around 2015. Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden get Mike to walk through what really happened, why in-store retail media is working now when it stalled then, and what his book Timing the Desert says about being right too early. Ricardo spent that same era at Hughes delivering managed digital signage to retailers, so this one gets personal and specific fast. This is a story of what was, what could have been, and the lessons every retail media network leader today should learn from the original in-store media network. In This Episode, You'll Learn · Why a retail media network inside Walmart's stores out-earned Walmart.com and still got deinstalled · How the fight over trade funds, national ad dollars, and shopper marketing budgets stalled in-store retail media for a decade, and what Amazon did to end it · Why DSIQ, an ex-Microsoft team out of Seattle, built an ad server for store screens before the industry had the term, and why the company never scaled past Walmart · The difference between a salesperson and a business development person, and why sending the wrong one into a retailer kills the deal · Mike's five A's of in-store content: accessible, appropriate, adaptable, attractive, assembled · Why he argues for localization over personalization, and what it means to treat 2,000 stores as 2,000 super customers · Who he thinks reaches the in-store retail media cereal moment first · Why in-store retail media will never be as lucrative as online, and why every retail media network is heading there anyway Support our sponsors. This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Through the Breakthruprogram, you can shape your experience before you even arrive. Request 15-minute, double opt-in meetings with the people you want to meet, join small-group conversations on the biggest questions in AI and retail, choose from more than 100 experiences, and connect over curated networking dinners. Retail and brand leaders can attend free, plus receive up to $1,750 toward travel and hotel. The Breakthru registration deadline has been extended to September 2. Register now at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations. Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off. Subscribe & Follow. How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube Featured guest. Mike Hiatt. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehiatt/ Founder & President of Dynamic Retailing. https://dynamic-retailing.com Author. Timing the Desert. https://a.co/d/07IJTQQS. Mike Hiatt is the president of Dynamic Retailing. A retail media consultancy focused on helping technology solutions providers work more effectively with retailers and assisting retailers better execute retail media strategies inside their stores. He is on the advisory boards at Venvee and Blue Zoo; he recently authored the business book Timing the Desert: A Front-Line perspective on Retail Media, Readiness, and Scale, which focuses on Hiatt’s experiences working at Walmart, Triad Retail Media, and Sam’s Club as well as key insights about where in-store retail media will land in the future of retail. Hiatt graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Advertising Management. Chapters. 00:00 Teaser 00:40 Intro 05:29 Welcome & Introduction 06:36 Early In-Store Media & Walmart TV 08:38 Building the Smart Network 12:22 Merchants vs. Marketers Friction 17:54 Timing the Desert: The Book 24:39 Being Early: DSIQ and the Ad Server Story 31:08 Business Development vs. Sales 38:27 The Retail Media Cereal Moment 44:54 In-Store vs. Online Media Philosophy 46:52 The Five A's, Localization & AI's Future 56:47 Show Close Meet your hosts. Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech: Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft. Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Episode Music. Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Hank Crawford of Blue Collar Robotics and Paul Harker, retired CCO of Woolworths Group, on grocery store robotics a retailer can deploy today. There are 280,000 people walking the aisles of US grocery stores right now picking somebody else's order, and grocers cannot hire fast enough to keep up with the growth. That number comes from Hank Crawford, Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Collar Robotics, and it frames the whole conversation. Online grocery keeps growing. Labor keeps getting harder to find. And the two big swings the industry took at eGrocery fulfillment, the centralized fulfillment center and the micro fulfillment center, both left grocers with high CapEx, duplicated inventory, and people still picking most of the order. Hank is joined by Paul Harker, retired Chief Commercial Officer of Woolworths Group, Australia's largest retailer, who joined Blue Collar Robotics as a strategic advisor. Together with Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden they work through the economics of eGrocery fulfillment from the operator's side of the table: why the warehouse answer collapsed, what grocery store robotics has been getting wrong, and why a purpose-built robot with a remote operator behind it can drop into a supermarket that already exists. The mechanism is the interesting part. Blue Collar Robotics sells the picking as a service. A grocer pays a cost per pick, which moves the spend from CapEx into OpEx. The robot handles packaged center-aisle goods using vacuum suction, which is roughly 65% of a typical order, and store associates get redeployed to fresh, where care actually shows up in the customer's bag. Blue Collar reports eGrocery fulfillment cost reductions of as much as 50%. This is Season 6, Episode 10. In This Episode, You'll Learn • Why centralized fulfillment centers failed for grocery on four separate counts: volume density, distance from the customer, fresh, and CapEx • What Paul Harker says micro fulfillment centers still cannot solve, including duplicated inventory and picking "the uglies" • Why over 80% of a grocer's business is still the in-store customer, and how eGrocery growth quietly degrades that experience • The case for a human behind every robot, and why it is now standard practice for anything operating in an unstructured environment • What robot etiquette means in a store aisle, and what China's hotel delivery robots taught Hank about how not to do it • How the grocery store robotics buying conversation changes when the customer has no robotics team of its own • Why grocery store robotics took this long to find product-market fit in a supermarket, and what changed • Why the labor argument runs backwards here: there is no line of people waiting for picking jobs • How remote operation opens picking work to people who could never physically do it, and opens a 24 hour picking clock for the store • What Hank says is actually slowing adoption, and it is not the technology Support our sponsors This episode was brought to you by RetailClub. Retail and brand leaders can attend RetailClub AI Festival completely budget-free, plus get $1,750 toward travel and hotel. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, it's three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach, September 22 to 24. Spend time with 2,000 senior leaders working through how AI is transforming retail. Register by August 28 at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast. The W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. Arizona State University is a leading public research university known for innovation, access, and impact. Its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States, with more than 25,000 students. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a three-day executive program running October 5-7. It's built by W. P. Carey's #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations. Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off. Preview it in our three-part Data Blades podcast mini-series this September with Professor Brett Duarte. Subscribe & Follow How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube Featured guests Hank Crawford. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hank-crawford-a4a9755/ Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Collar Robotics. https://bluecollarrobotics.ai Hank Crawford is Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Collar Robotics, where he leads the company's mission to make in-store grocery picking affordable for retailers through purpose-built robots delivered as a service, pairing AI-driven autonomy with human-assisted teleoperation. A technology entrepreneur and commercial leader with more than 35 years of experience in advanced composites, global manufacturing, and robotics, Crawford has founded companies in the United States and China including PURE Material Science, a Guangzhou-based pioneer of continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites and has helped scale advanced technology businesses in senior engineering and commercial roles at Performance Materials Corporation (acquired by Toray), Daimler Trucks in both North America and China, TRB Lightweight Structures, and Avient. He holds multiple patents in composite materials and manufacturing. Paul Harker. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-s-harker/ Retired Chief Commercial Officer, Woolworths Group. Strategic Advisor. Blue Collar Robotics. Paul Harker has more than three decades of senior leadership experience across Australia’s retail and FMCG sectors, including 33 years with Woolworths Group. Most recently, Paul served as Chief Commercial Officer for Woolworths Group, where he was accountable for the $51 billion Australian Food commercial portfolio. In this role, he oversaw commercial practices across more than 1,000 stores and helped lead large-scale enterprise transformation initiatives, including the modernization of digital systems and the integration of data-led analytics across complex supply chain networks. Paul’s earlier executive roles at Woolworths included leadership across Replenishment, Supply Chain, and Store Operations, giving him a broad understanding of the full retail operating model – from store execution to enterprise-level commercial strategy. Chapters 00:00 Teaser 00:48 Show Intro 05:34 Welcome Hank and Paul! 06:37 Why Warehouses Failed 09:02 Store Picking Tensions 10:28 Amazon Threat Reality 14:47 Robotics Hype vs Reality 16:34 Human in the Loop 18:34 Blue Collar Robotics Intro 19:46 Service Model Economics 22:35 How Store Deployment Works 25:48 Comparing Other Models 30:50 Automation and Jobs 32:35 Scaling Labor With Robots 33:43 24 Hour Store Operations 35:09 Accuracy And Quality Standards 36:48 AI Regulation And Safety 40:18 Robot Etiquette In Aisles 41:36 China Robotics Lessons 45:19 Selling To Risk Averse Grocers 49:36 Five Year Outlook And Jobs 52:19 Wrap Up And Where To Learn More 53:40 Show Close Meet your hosts Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech: Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft. Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Music Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Mark Ryski explains why store traffic is a critical retail metric and how in‑store environments convert far higher than online. Hear data comparisons (in‑store up to 70% vs online 3% and Amazon 10%) and why 77% of shoppers left big‑box stores despite intending to buy (no help, long lines). Practical insights for retail leaders to boost in‑store conversion and checkout experience. This is Season 6, Episode 9. 77% of shoppers who walked out of a big box store without buying told exit interviewers they came in to buy. They couldn't find help, wouldn't wait in line, and left empty-handed. Mark Ryski has spent almost 3 decades measuring that gap, and his new book gives it a name: Store Traffic Is A Gift, and most retailers waste it. This episode, Ricardo and Casey sit down with Mark Ryski, founder and CEO of HeadCount Corporation, to dig into retail's most misunderstood metric: in-store conversion. Physical stores convert 20% to 70%+ of their store traffic. Typical online sites convert under 3%, and Amazon converts about 10%. The store converts several times better than any other channel, yet 84% of retail sales (US Census Bureau, March 2026) still get managed as if online were winning, and in-store conversion gets treated as a vibe at the end of the day. In This Episode, You'll Learn: • Why a store can get more traffic and sell less, and what conversion data reveals. • The exit survey result that changed a big box operator's mind about service. • The single fastest conversion win, and why most chains schedule it backwards. • How super converting stores hit 75% while sister stores in the same chain sit at 30%. • The CFO conversation: what 100 basis points of conversion is worth in top-line sales. • What BOPIS, curbside, and Amazon returns really do to store traffic and conversion. • Why accurate store traffic data is the demand signal AI needs before anything else. Support our sponsors: This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub. Join 2,000 retail leaders at RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast Subscribe & Follow: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5 star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube Featured guest: Mark Ryski. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-ryski-8826601/ CEO, HeadCount Corporation. https://headcount.com Author, Store Traffic Is A Gift. https://a.co/d/00VI3Uuj Mark Ryski is the founder and CEO of HeadCount Corporation and one of the retail industry's leading authorities on store traffic and shopper conversion. For more than 20 years, he has helped retailers—from independent stores to large national chains in over 20 countries—convert more store visits into sales and make better operating decisions. He is the author of three books on retail performance, including Store Traffic Is a Gift: The Retailer's Guide to Converting Visits into Sales, Conversion: The Last Great Retail Metric, and When Retail Customers Count, the first book dedicated to the study of store traffic. Mark is a longtime BrainTrust contributor on RetailWire and has been recognized as a Rethink Retail Top Retail Expert in 2025 and 2026. Chapters: 00:00 Teaser 00:32 Show Intro 05:06 Welcome, Mark Ryski! 10:28 Traffic Is a Gift 13:09 Origin Story - Counting Traffic 16:45 Conversion Numbers and Fast Wins 23:16 Exit Surveys Reveal Missed Sales 26:22 Proving Payroll Pays Back 28:08 Inside Super Converting Stores 31:57 BOPIS And Amazon Traffic Trap 38:23 AI Needs Clean Traffic Data 44:52 Optimism For Physical Retail 48:03 Show Close Meet your hosts: Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech: Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft. Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

BONUS S6E8 A Zebra ZONE 2026 recap on pragmatic AI, on-device AI, super apps, and giving store associates their day back Ricardo Belmar just got back from Zebra Technologies’ ZONE 2026 conference in Nashville, where pragmatic AI was the main theme. In this special bonus episode of The Retail Razor Show, he and Casey Golden unpack what it all means for retail’s frontline workers. This is a story about pragmatic AI, the kind that gives store associates and warehouse teams their day back instead of promising the moon. The headline from ZONE 2026? Zebra is no longer telling a devices story. It’s telling a frontline platform story, anchored by on-device AI that runs with no cloud, no tokens, and no waiting. Ricardo brought back two exclusive interviews, with Zebra CTO Tom Bianculli and Mobile Computing chief James Poulton, plus a notebook full of stats, demos, and hallway conversations that deliver the full pragmatic AI story. We get into why frontline workers are drowning in 70 to 80 apps when they only use about a dozen, the super app built to fix it, real-time translation running live on a device, and why “tokenless” pragmatic AI became the word of the week. If you want to understand on-device AI and what it delivers for frontline workers, this episode is your shortcut. In This Episode, You'll Learn • Zebra’s three big software announcements: Nucleus, Workcloud IO, and Workcloud BI • The 80-apps problem and the super app designed to collapse it down to one experience • Why on-device AI, tokenless and at the edge, beats cloud round trips for frontline use cases • Real-time translation in any language, live on the device • Micro-learning, the “TikTok of learning,” and tackling 70 to 80% frontline turnover • Picture proof of delivery: how a second and a half scales into tens of millions of dollars • The octopus organization, and why intelligence belongs at the edge of the org • James Poulton on why large language models are overhyped for the enterprise Why it matters We’ve spent years on this show arguing that your associate experience is your customer experience. ZONE 2026 felt like the technology industry finally catching up to that idea, treating frontline workers as the most under-invested asset in retail and giving them on-device AI that augments rather than replaces. Pragmatic AI wins on the accumulation of small moments, and that is the thread we pull all episode long. Subscribe & Follow If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5 star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades. Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/ Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube Featured guests Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer, Zebra Technologies https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-bianculli-9053892/ James Poulton, SVP & GM, Mobile Computing, Zebra Technologies https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamespoulton/ Chapters 00:00 Teaser 01:01 Show intro 02:12 What Zebra announced at ZONE 2026 04:00 The 80-apps problem and the super app 06:53 Real-time translation on the device 08:55 Tokenless, on-device AI explained 11:46 Best moment: the octopus organization 15:43 Interview: Tom Bianculli, CTO Zebra Technologies 35:50 Recap: pragmatic AI and returning time to workers 40:27 Interview: James Poulton, SVP & GM Mobile Computing 53:21 Big takeaways from ZONE 2026 59:32 Show Close Meet your hosts Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech: Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft. Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.